Context

As the leading provider of high voltage power systems, Transelec plays an essential role in Chile’s energy development, with over 10,000 km of transmission line and 70 substations spanning the country from north to south. This range means we have to manage assets in areas with very different features: arid, mountain and coastal zones, etc., which affect how we build and maintain these assets in terms of weatherproofing.

From a climate change perspective, there is a growing threat to our infrastructure, since extreme climate events -such as droughts, floods and forest fires-, are increasingly severe and can damage transmission lines on a large scale, causing blackouts if these are not addressed in time.

Challenge

The challenge is to reduce physical risks stemming from climate change for Transelec power transmission infrastructure (trasmission lines and substations). 

We aim to capture and regularly monitor updated information about climate threats, in order to identify, evaluate and manage risk in a timely manner. We will thus be able to take action to enhance asset resilience.

What we’re looking for

This challenge is to find solutions designed to identify, assess, profile and model threats and impacts stemming from climate change that affect our infrastructure. We are looking for systems, methodologies, models, applications and devices, among others. 

Besides pooling data systematically, the objective is to generate predictions and estimates that will permanently improve decision making over time.

Driving questions

• How can we automate the updating of climate threat information?
• How can we identify the physical risks of climate change for our infrastructure?
• How can we self-manage the diagnosis and analysis of climate change impacts?
• How can we prioritize the most urgent risks that entail the greatest impact?
• How can we digitize and centralize risk analysis?
• How can we trace and evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation measures implemented?
• How can we model and project the impact of climate threats that have been automatically identified?