Black & Veatch Offers Services to Energy Providers Coping With Asset Stressors and Storms

The power grid, vulnerable to harsh climate conditions, is struggling in the face of increasingly common extreme weather events. To keep up, the power industry must evolve quickly to ensure that generation, transmission, and distribution systems can withstand heavy storms and droughts while still meeting customer demands.

According to Black & Veatch’s 2020 Strategic Directions: Election Report, aging infrastructure, aging workforce, and system upgrades and modernization are the top concerns of the industry. As utilities work to incorporate renewables, meet calls for decarbonization, cycle out fossil fuels and take on the advent of electric vehicles, these obstacles loom large.

To address this, Black & Veatch has expanded its portfolio. The global engineering, procurement and construction leader will now provide client assistance across four areas of the energy sector, notes an article by Construtech. Black & Veatch now offers intelligence-based asset monitoring, operations and maintenance services, asset hardening and storm readiness, disaster response services and workforce need supplements.

In the asset monitoring service, data analytics will play a large role. Black & Veatch’s collaboration with IBM will provide a tangible solution to data management. The joint project will combine Black & Veatch’s asset management services with IBM’s Maximo Application suite, pairing real-time data analytics with artificial intelligence, to “reduce thousands of incoming data points to a handful of actionable escalations by making predictions and then screening and diagnosing alerts,” writes Construtech.