Remote Monitoring’s Role in Workforce Efficiency

Electric utility field crews are being pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, the grid is expanding and becoming more complex, as distributed generation, battery storage, and extreme weather hardening projects add thousands of new assets to the maintenance roster.

On the other hand, the industry’s most experienced technicians are retiring faster than they can be replaced. According to the Canadian Electricity Association, nearly half of utility workers are expected to reach retirement age within the next decade, leaving a critical skills gap just as demand for reliability reaches an all-time high.

The result is a widening workload and workforce imbalance. Operations and maintenance (O&M) professionals are asked to cover more territory, respond to more alarms, and complete more compliance inspections, often with the same, or even shrinking, headcount. Traditional tools alone can’t close that gap. What’s needed is a step change in productivity, and substation remote monitoring provides exactly that.

Why Workforce Efficiency Has Become Priority One

1. Shrinking labor pool. Skilled technologists and powerline maintainers are near the top of the industry’s “most in demand” list, yet the apprenticeship pipeline isn’t filling quickly enough to backfill retirements.
2. Rising travel overhead. Routine inspections at remote sites can absorb up to 20 percent of an O&M budget in fuel, accommodation, and unproductive drive time, especially for utilities with large rural footprints.
3. Manual data collection. Thermal scans, breaker counter reads, and switch position checks still rely heavily on boots on the ground visits, consuming hours that could be spent on higher value tasks.
4. Storm driven overtime. Major weather events are increasing in frequency. Crews already operating at capacity must then pivot to emergency repairs, compounding fatigue and safety risk.

Against this backdrop, utilities are searching for technologies that convert repetitive or hazardous work into automated, data driven workflows. That is where modern, Touchless™ remote monitoring platforms, combining utility grade thermal and visual sensors with secure edge analytics, come into play.

Six Ways Remote Monitoring Streamlines Field Operations

1. Fewer Truck Rolls

Continuous, 24/7 monitoring shifts inspections from scheduled to as needed. Potential problems, such as a hot bushing on a power transformer, trigger an exception alarm that can be triaged from the control center. Utilities that have implemented condition based monitoring routinely report 40–50 percent reductions in annual truck rolls, freeing technicians for skilled work while cutting fuel spend and carbon emissions.

2. Faster Decision Making

High resolution pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) and infrared (IR) imagery is integrated directly into SCADA or asset management systems. Dispatchers can assess equipment condition, switch status, or weather damage in seconds rather than hours, dramatically compressing mean time to repair. One Midwestern cooperative documented a 75percent drop in the time required to reconfigure feeders after storms once live camera views were available.

3. Condition Based Maintenance

Edge analytics trend temperature, load, and environmental data to identify emerging faults long before they reach critical thresholds. Targeted maintenance activities can then be scheduled during normal working hours, reducing unplanned outages and extending asset life.

4. Multipurpose Visibility 

A single sensor network can serve multiple departments. While asset health analytics run in the background, the same platform supports intrusion detection, wildlife mitigation, and even visual confirmation of contractor activities. Consolidating these functions into one “pane of glass” avoids duplicated capital spend and eliminates data silos.

5. Safer Working Conditions

By automating routine site visits, crews spend less time in high voltage yards, reducing exposure to arc flash, slip and fall, and heat stress hazards. During inclement weather, remote monitoring allows many checks to be completed from the safety of the control room.

6. Post Storm Rapid Assessment

After a major weather event, every minute counts. Remote cameras and thermal sensors provide an instant visual sweep of a substation’s insulating oil levels, broken insulators, or blown fuses. Control room staff can create a precise work order before the first truck rolls, ensuring crews arrive with the right parts and safety equipment on board. In a recent Atlantic Canada ice storm, this approach shaved nearly four hours off average restoration times for affected feeders.

Implementation Guidance for O&M Leaders

1. Start with your highest pain stations. Target sites that require frequent travel, have challenging access roads, or regularly impact SAIDI/SAIFI metrics. Early wins build internal support and free budget for broader deployment.
2. Specify utility grade hardware. Equipment should meet IEEE 1613 or IEC 618503 standards to withstand electromagnetic interference, temperature extremes (40 °C to +70 °C), and lightning induced surges.
3. Integrate, don’t duplicate. Use open protocol so health and security data flow directly into existing SCADA, historian, and asset performance management (APM) platforms.
4. Plan a change management track. Field efficiency gains aren’t realized without operator confidence. A concise training program is usually enough for technicians to become comfortable with dashboards, alarm thresholds, and camera controls.
5. Measure what matters. Define baseline KPIs (truck rolls, travel hours, mean time to repair, overtime) and track them monthly. Transparent data helps justify expansion and supports regulatory filings that seek performance-based incentives.

Remote monitoring transforms substation maintenance from a calendar based, labor-intensive routine into an exception based, data driven workflow. By eliminating unnecessary travel, reducing overtime, and reallocating skilled technicians to tasks that truly require hands-on expertise, utilities can bridge the growing workforce gap while simultaneously improving reliability and safety. For O&M professionals tasked with “doing more with less,” automated sensing and analytics have moved from a nice to have experiment to an operational necessity.

Fabricio Silva is a Field Application Engineer with Systems with Intelligence.