Many utilities view continuous monitoring as a future upgrade. But the truth is, it's already delivering measurable returns across the industry. This blog shows how delaying deployment leads to higher costs, greater risk, and missed opportunities to modernize.

Predictive maintenance is no longer an abstract goal, it's a practical reality. This blog outlines how utilities are phasing in continuous monitoring solutions with a scalable “crawl, walk, run” roadmap. Learn how to start small, build value, and position your utility for grid intelligence.

Traditional thermal inspections only provide a momentary snapshot of asset health. In today’s complex and aging grid, that’s no longer enough. This blog explores why utilities are moving toward continuous monitoring to reduce operational risk, improve reliability, and enable proactive maintenance.

The grid is a dynamic, distributed platform with rising expectations for resilience, efficiency, and adaptability. Transmission and distribution (T&D) utilities now operate in a landscape shaped by increasingly volatile weather events, workforce constraints, aging infrastructure, and mounting pressure to integrate renewable generation.

For utilities navigating the pressures of grid modernization, the transformer remains one of the most critical and vulnerable assets in the power system. These components are not only expensive to replace but can also take years to procure and install. A single transformer failure can cascade into major outages, regulatory scrutiny, and multimillion-dollar losses.

As electric utilities evolve to meet the demands of a distributed, digitized, and decarbonized grid, many are expanding their asset base to include more remote, unmanned sites. These include traditional substations to renewable generation facilities and battery energy storage systems (BESS). These sites are critical to the modern grid, yet they present a unique operational challenge: how to effectively monitor, secure, and maintain them without relying on frequent physical inspections.

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.

The electric grid is becoming the most important infrastructure platform of the 21st century, yet many substations still rely on workflows designed for an analog era. Aging assets, weather volatility, and the surge of distributed energy resources (DERs) have converged to create an inflection point: utilities that digitize their substations will unlock the agility, resilience, and intelligence required for the next decade of growth. Those that do not will find themselves contending with rising O&M costs, unpredictable outages, and shareholder skepticism.

Electric utilities have long been stewards of vast data sets: kilowatt‑hour reads, outage logs, SCADA snapshots. What has shifted is the speed at which those numbers must inform strategic decisions. Today’s grid planners juggle rooftop PV ramps, EV clustering, wildfire risk, and unprecedented weather volatility, often in the same work week. Waiting days for a batch‑processed report is no longer tenable when megawatts can swing in minutes and board directives arrive with quarterly timelines.

Operations & Maintenance teams have always walked a tightrope: ensuring today’s reliability while safeguarding tomorrow’s asset health. In the past, calendar‑based inspections, periodic SCADA polls, and institutional expertise kept that balance. But today’s grid pressed by extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and rapid electrification, demands decisions in seconds, not in weeks‑long maintenance cycles. Real‑time monitoring meets that demand, converting every pole‑top device, transformer, and right‑of‑way into a live data stream that flags issues before they blossom into outages.