Utilities are facing growing pressure to strengthen grid resilience, reduce wildfire risk, manage vegetation more proactively, and make faster decisions across increasingly complex service territories. Yet many teams are still working with incomplete, fragmented, or outdated data that makes it difficult to see risk clearly, prioritize resources, and act with confidence at scale.
In this Geo Week News webinar, Woolpert and Southern California Edison (SCE) will share a real-time look at how Woolpert’s high-definition, high-altitude airborne lidar capability – ZEUS – is being applied during an active utility project to support one of the industry’s most technical and operationally complex challenges: vegetation risk management.
Rather than focusing on final outcomes alone, this discussion will explore the work in progress — how Woolpert and SCE are approaching project execution, hitting key milestones, navigating technical complexity, and transforming large-scale lidar data into actionable intelligence. The session will examine how advanced airborne sensing can help utilities better understand aboveground infrastructure conditions, vegetation encroachment, clearance issues, terrain-driven exposure, access constraints, and network-wide risk factors that may be difficult to identify through traditional inspection methods alone.
Attendees will gain insight into how ZEUS supports a more complete and connected view of the utility environment, helping teams move beyond isolated observations toward data that can inform resource planning, field prioritization, vegetation management, asset visibility, and long-term resilience strategies.
This webinar will serve as a precursor to a broader Geo Week 2027 conversation, offering an early look at how Woolpert and Southern California Edison are applying advanced geospatial intelligence in the field, and what it means for the future of proactive, data-driven utility operations.
Speakers
Nathan Hopper, PhD
Discipline Leader, Advanced Sensing and Processing, Woolpert
Sam Acheson
Market Director, Energy and Utilities, Woolpert
