Top Innovators
Hong Ablack is Manager, Asset Mgmt & Strategy, and Dan Greenwood is an Asset Management Consultant, For CenterPoint Energy.
CenterPoint Energy won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Florence Fogler Top Innovator in Energy Transmission Technologies'' for its Underground Residential Distribution Cable Life Extension Using AI Scanning Technology.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Please describe the innovation and its positive impact.
Hong Ablack: I think the best way to answer this question is in three parts, first the challenge we were facing, second the innovative technology we deployed, and finally the positive impact we experienced. We were challenged with too many aged medium-voltage cables, literally thousands of miles, failing at an unacceptably high rate.
We estimated it would take us over one hundred thirty million dollars and one hundred years to replace them with our legacy approach. We had to find a way to solve this affordability and reliability challenge.
That's when we became aware of new scientific work indicating cables, like many other assets, deteriorate at discrete locations that can be fixed, if you can find defects. We worked with Osmose to deploy a capitalized cable life extension program using an AI-based cable scanning technology that compiles millions of diagnostic data points to pinpoint microscopic defects before failure, direct repair and replacement decisions, and check the quality of upgrades.