Managing vegetation near power lines is one of the biggest operational challenges for electric utilities, especially as extreme weather events become more common. CATALYST’s new service, INSIGHTS Vegetation Management, uses satellite technology to monitor vegetation encroachment, helping utilities reduce outages, prevent wildfires and manage their operations more efficiently.
By shifting from traditional, time-based maintenance to condition-based insights, utilities can better protect communities, infrastructure and natural environments.
Kevin Jones
At the centre of this work is Kevin Jones, Chief Product Officer at CATALYST, who leads the company’s product direction and ensures every solution is grounded in operational reality.
Much of his day is spent turning measurements gathered hundreds of kilometres above Earth into tools that help ground-level teams work safely and efficiently.
Each week, Jones begins with a market review – identifying the challenges utilities and other operators face, the data sources that can address those challenges and where the business case makes sense.
The process involves writing clear problem statements, setting measurable goals and giving engineering teams the context they need to deliver.
He also bridges technical and operational roles, translating complex data into plain language and field needs into technical terms. “In short, my role is to help satellites, algorithms and line crews pull in the same direction,” he adds.
CATALYST began more than forty years ago in Canada, when satellite images still arrived on magnetic tape. “The company built early viewing software that let scientists inspect that data on desktop workstations,” he recalls. Over the years those tools expanded, supporting everything from stereo mapping to large-area change detection.
Today CATALYST’s customers include national mapping agencies, environmental consultants and electric utilities. Some need raw processing power to run their own analytics; others subscribe to finished information layers delivered through the company’s INSIGHTS platform. “Whatever the service level, every client expects dependable, repeatable results that stand up to engineering scrutiny,” he says.
The firm remains privately owned and has grown well beyond its Ottawa headquarters. It maintains a development hub at the Harwell Space Campus in Oxfordshire and recently opened a branch in Scotland to support projects across the northern grid.
The idea for INSIGHTS Vegetation Management took shape as several trends converged: miniaturised satellites began sending back high-resolution images every day, cloud services put large-scale processing within reach and utilities faced mounting pressure to lower wildfire risk. “That mix pointed to an opening to move beyond software licences and supply direct answers for non-geospatial professionals,” he says.
Jones points out that the team also watched the tragic sequence of fires linked to overhead-line failures – the 2018 Camp Fire in California, the 2023 events on Maui and smaller incidents elsewhere. Investigations repeatedly highlighted vegetation that had grown unchecked or had fallen across conductors during storms. Utilities needed a dependable way to see those hazards across entire networks without dispatching every ground crew at once.
INSIGHTS Vegetation Management addresses that requirement. Instead of sending raw pixels, the product generates straightforward metrics – tree height, clearance distance, fall potential – for every span of line. “Operations planners receive a ranked list of locations that warrant attention, allowing them to allocate inspection teams where the threat is greatest and schedule trimming based on real conditions rather than a calendar,” he explains.
“Satellites orbit along consistent paths, collecting optical pairs that we process in stereo,” he explains. By measuring the small shift between the two images, CATALYST’s software rebuilds a three-dimensional surface. From that surface the system isolates vegetation, calculates its height and gauges how close individual trees sit to the nearest conductor.
The method covers thousands of kilometres in a single pass and costs a fraction of helicopter LiDAR or foot patrols. “Crews still walk or fly the line where necessary, yet they start with a map showing exactly where clearance has already been lost or where a tall fir might topple onto the circuit after the next storm,” he says.
Traditional programmes follow a fixed timetable – inspect every feeder every three or five years regardless of growth rate. Satellite-driven analysis supports a condition-based model.
Kevin Jones
The whole network is screened once or twice a year; segments that look healthy can wait, while sections with rapid regrowth move to the top of the queue. “Resources shift from routine travel to targeted mitigation,” he notes.
Condition-based scheduling starts with comprehensive imagery, then funnels crews toward the small percentage of spans that account for most risk. “Utilities often discover that fewer than ten per cent of their network needs immediate field verification after each satellite cycle,” he observes.
Scaling labour in this way delivers measurable savings. “Early analyses show inspection costs per kilometre falling by as much as forty per cent compared with fixed patrols, while trimming contracts can be negotiated more accurately because the volume of material is known in advance,” he explains.
Safety improves alongside the balance sheet. Fewer unplanned outages mean lower ignition probability during high-wind events and line crews spend less time in hazardous terrain since their visits are tightly focused. “At the same time, regulators gain confidence because every decision rests on time-stamped evidence rather than an assumed cycle,” he adds.
Severe weather often leaves utilities with an incomplete picture of field conditions. “Within hours of a storm, our tasking partners can retarget satellites over the affected corridor and return fresh images for analysis the same day, even when roads remain blocked,” he says.
The service then cross-references outage records, customer density and critical-infrastructure layers supplied by the utility. This combined view highlights areas where fallen trees could delay restoration or where burn scars may raise the risk of debris flows around poles and substations.
Management teams use these maps to stage repair crews, allocate replacement hardware and brief emergency responders. In the weeks that follow, repeated acquisitions track regrowth and identify stands that have died due to heat, signalling future fuel build-up. What once required low-level flights now arrives through a secure portal in minutes.
Reliability starts with the sensor. CATALYST draws on commercial constellations that guarantee both image quality and stereo geometry. “If cloud hides one view, another satellite is retasked and service-level agreements define delivery windows so utilities can plan against real dates,” he explains.
The next safeguard lies in the company’s own algorithms, refined over decades of photogrammetric research. “Controlling the full processing chain lets us tune parameters, check results against ground surveys and push updates rapidly when satellites change,” he says.
Finally, presentation counts. Users open a web map or an API feed that drops risk scores straight into their existing asset-management system. Each span is colour-coded and drill-down panels list the trees that triggered the alert together with coordinates, height and clearance. Field crews see the same location on a mobile device and know precisely what to cut.
Extreme weather events are increasing in both frequency and severity. Utilities therefore need a clear, repeatable picture of their assets and the surrounding environment.
Satellite services provide that wide-area view and do so at scales that match national grids.
Kevin Jones
Vegetation monitoring is only the first layer. Interferometric radar now detects millimetre-level ground movement near dams and pipelines, while thermal sensors can flag hotspots along lines before equipment fails. Merging these datasets will turn the power corridor into an actively monitored system rather than a set of static assets.
CATALYST believes the real change will come when these observations feed directly into operational software. A dispatcher who once relied on yearly patrol logs will soon check a dashboard that updates overnight, assigning crews to vegetation, ground motion, or overheating conductors in the same session.
That shift will raise reliability, reduce wildfire liability and support a grid that can better withstand climate pressure.
