Utility regulators across the country are converging on the same expectation: inspections must produce more than a compliance checklist. From Hawaii's wildfire mitigation plan updates to Texas's new WMP filing guidance, state commissions increasingly want inspection findings fed into risk and ignition models. This asset condition data helps drive investment decisions and prioritize the actions that follow. That's a higher bar than just proving an inspection took place.
Most utilities have matured their inspection programs in the field, but what happens to the data afterwards is the harder problem. Images, defect notes, GIS records, work orders and contractor reports tend to live in separate systems and departments and go quiet once a report is filed. However, when that data is centralized and searchable, it becomes a digital asset condition hub that delivers both the insights to act on and real cost-savings. Coldwater Board of Public Utilities, a Michigan municipal utility, has taken this approach, scaling from a two-feeder pilot to roughly 16,000 assets without adding staff, matching the inspection capability of much larger IOUs.
A utility living this shift
Evergy's distribution team offers a clear picture of what this looks like in practice. Manhole and vault inspectors began capturing imagery in 2016 in Missouri on an eight-year cycle that required a three-person qualified electrical crew: one person entering the space with a camera, two staying above ground to manage rescue equipment, air monitoring and traffic control. The imagery it produced was often too pixelated for engineers to assess a defect closely, so crews frequently went back for a second look.
In 2019, Evergy shifted to a non-entry method that captures high-resolution imagery without sending anyone underground, eliminating the need for confined space permits, rescue standby, while minimizing the need for third-party traffic control. In early 2026, the inspection imagery moved into Grid Vision® as a central, searchable repository. Design and construction teams that previously had minimal access to the inspection data can now pull up manhole imagery before a project to verify underground infrastructure, instead of sending a crew to verify what's already documented. This eliminates putting someone in harms way and a truck roll to gather readily retrieval data.
“Centralizing this data didn't just make inspections more efficient. It gave teams across the business a current, reliable picture of our system they'd never had access to before,”
Travis Clark
Asset Management Engineer, Evergy.
Wildfire and weather risk keep expanding
Farther west, where utilities face longer, more intense wildfire seasons, even the smallest components carry outsized risk. At one Mountain West utility, roughly 7% of observed cotter pins in an inspection cycle were found to be installed upside down, a defect that can raise the odds of conductor movement or arcing under high-wind, high-fire conditions, triggering an ignition.
The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) made this same point at an industry level in their recent wildfire technology framework, positioning asset condition intelligence as a foundational input across every stage of wildfire risk reduction, from pre-season mitigation planning through post-event recovery.
What condition data unlocks
Once that condition data is centralized, utilities can start asking new questions of it instead of starting over every time a new risk surfaces. Using approaches like Adaptive AI, utility teams can train a detector for a newly identified defect type and run it back across years of existing inspection imagery to identify where it’s installed but also how it’s degraded over time, rather than waiting for the next inspection cycle to find it. This cuts weeks of model development work, months of field investigations and days of human review down to a 30-minute activity.
Start with what you already have
Utilities don't need a finished, future-state architecture to start. The more useful starting point is a set of honest questions.
- Where does inspection data live today?
- Who can act on this data?
- What risk, maintenance, or wildfire mitigation decisions are still being made without this data?
To see how eSmart Systems and Grid Vision help utilities turn inspection data into a connected, decision-ready asset record, visit esmartsystems.com/virtual-grid-assets-inspection.
Donald McPhail is Vice President of Market Development at eSmart Systems, where he works with electric utilities across the U.S. on asset intelligence, inspection modernization and wildfire mitigation strategy.