T&D World Live Preview: PowerUP Lunch Sessions

The T&D World Live Conference will be hosting four PowerUP Lunch sessions. These sessions provide an opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss best practices and learn from your peers in a small group setting. You pick the topic and sit with others who are interested in the same topic. Each discussion is moderated by a leading professional in the field.

You can reserve your spot when you register online, add it anytime to your existing registration, or secure a seat onsite at the registration desk — while spots are availalble.

Tuesday, September 23, 2025, 11:45 AM - 1:30 PM

• Elevating Asset Management: Leveraging Drone Imagery to Move Beyond Defect Detection to Condition-Driven Asset Strategies
  • Speakers: Jay Jenkins and Matt Zafuto, Cyberhawk
  • Room: Solana A
  • Traditional utility inspections focus on identifying defects, but what if you could see the bigger picture? This interactive luncheon session explores how drone imagery, with its high fidelity and repeatability, is unlocking smarter, condition-driven asset management strategies on T&D infrastructure. By augmenting traditional defect standards with condition assessment techniques, utilities can monitor asset health trends over time, enabling more proactive, data-driven maintenance planning. Here, you'll learn how this approach helps utilities shift from reactive repairs to long-term reliability and system resilience.
• Empowering Grid Reliability Through Analytics
  
  • Speakers: Tom Anderson, Jim Magnanini and Muneeb Mohammad, SAS
  • Room: Solana B

  • Join us for a lunch session where we'll demonstrate how analytics can be seamlessly integrated into real-world transmission and distribution operations — not as a complex overhaul, but as a plug-and-play solution that solves real problems.

    Our interactive discussion will feature examples from customers who have successfully applied data-driven insights to everyday challenges and gained enhanced grid reliability, optimized asset performance, and elevated customer satisfaction. 

    We'll focus on topics such as Identifying Small Wire and Distribution Capacity Issues, Asset Health Analysis, Understanding Usage Patterns and Outages to drive optimize Grid Reliability, and Improving Reliability Indices through RF Emission Analysis.   This isn’t just about technology; it’s about delivering measurable impact, faster decisions, and smarter investments.

• Power Moves: Navigating M&A and Investment Trends in the Energy Sector
  
  • Speaker: Alexander Carbone, Clairvest
  • Room: Solana C
  • Join us for an engaging business lunch session where industry leaders and investors converge to explore the evolving landscape of mergers, acquisitions, and capital deployment in the energy sector. From traditional power generation to emerging clean technologies, we’ll unpack the strategic drivers behind recent deals, spotlight key market trends, and examine how geopolitical shifts and regulatory frameworks are shaping investment decisions. Whether you're actively pursuing transactions or simply looking to sharpen your market perspective, this session offers valuable insights and candid discussion.
• Unlocking Predictive Insights — The Future of Fault Prediction and Detection
  • Speaker: Mike Burns, Safegrid USA
  • Room: Solana D
  • Three use cases will be discussed:
    • Fault prediction – Improving system reliability is a key task for utility operations and maintenance teams.  New technology is being applied to help utilities anticipate grid anomalies and avoid outages utilizing various data sources. Safegrid’s solution is able to identify incipient and emerging faults based on detection of partial discharge, leakage current and series arcing on the electrical grid.  Multiple case studies highlight the predictive fault location that identifies failing equipment such as insulators, lightning arrestors, breakers and switches.   
      • Fault detection.  The causes of intermittent faults are difficult to determine and faults with high impedance or low current may not be detected by traditional fault detection or protection devices that rely on current detection only.  Safegrid uses high speed sensors and advanced detection algorithms to identify and locate intermittent and hard to find fault events.
      • Fault location.  During any outage, reaction time is critical to isolate a fault and then repair the problem so that power can be restored.  Patrolling lines is time consuming and can pose safety hazards for utility line crews.  Safegrid locates faults on utility grids to within +/- 100 yard accuracy on a map in just seconds. Several fault location case studies will be presented including examples of transformer failures, broken cross arms and insulators, downed conductors and wildlife interactions.