Background

When consecutive winter storms Darragh and Eowyn swept across Ireland in December 2024 and January 2025, the country experienced some of the most severe weather events in recent years. Thousands of homes and businesses were left without power, and large sections of ESB Networks’ distribution infrastructure were damaged by fallen trees, broken cross-arms, and collapsed poles.

Restoring service across Ireland’s vast and often remote grid required not only rapid field deployment but also immediate situational awareness — understanding what was damaged, where, and how severely. To enable this, ESB turned to Arkion’s AI-powered asset analytics platform, built to process visual and LiDAR data at scale and translate it into actionable condition insights within hours.

The challenge

In the aftermath of extreme weather, speed, coverage, and accuracy are critical. Traditional inspection methods — such as helicopter flyovers and ground-based visual checks — can take weeks to complete and often leave critical faults undetected, especially in dense vegetation or hard-to-reach terrain.

ESB needed a rapid-response solution that could:

• Handle large volumes of drone imagery gathered by multiple contractors in parallel.
  
• Automatically detect storm-related damage on distribution assets.
  
• Provide a clear visual overview of affected sections to support repair planning.
• Integrate results into existing maintenance and reporting systems for immediate action.

The solution

Arkion’s platform was deployed to process 736 kilometers of drone-captured inspection data from storm-affected areas. Using its scalable cloud infrastructure and production AI models, Arkion converted raw imagery and LiDAR data into a structured digital overview of ESB’s network within 48 hours.

The platform identified 2,533 damaged components — including broken insulators, fallen poles, and vegetation obstructions — and geo-referenced each defect to its exact location. ESB’s teams could instantly visualize the results in a map-based interface, filter findings by defect type and severity, and prioritize field teams accordingly.

Capabilities applied included:

• AI-driven classification of structural damage and vegetation interference.
  
• Integration of image and LiDAR data for combined situational context.
  
  

Rapid quality assurance through Arkion’s human-in-the-loop review process, ensuring safe, accurate, and actionable results.

Impact

The collaboration enabled ESB to accelerate storm recovery, improving both response time and coordination across departments.

• Faster restoration: Rapid assessment enabled earlier repairs and reduced outage duration.
  
• Improved coordination: Shared digital insights connected field, operations, and asset management teams.
  
• Better resilience planning: The digital record supports post-event analysis and long-term investment decisions.
  
• Proven scalability: Demonstrated how AI and automation can support utilities under emergency conditions.
  

This initiative showcased how a modern, data-driven approach to inspections can dramatically strengthen resilience during high-impact events — helping utilities safeguard both infrastructure and communities.

Looking ahead

Following the success of this storm recovery initiative, ESB and Arkion continue to explore how AI-powered analytics can support predictive maintenance, vegetation management, and asset health tracking — building long-term resilience into Ireland’s power grid. As weather patterns become increasingly extreme, these capabilities are becoming a cornerstone of how utilities plan, operate, and protect their networks, ensuring a safer, more reliable energy future for all.

About ESB (Electricity Supply Board of Ireland)

ESB Networks is responsible for the operation, maintenance, and development of Ireland’s national electricity transmission and distribution system. Serving over 2.4 million customers, ESB plays a central role in ensuring a safe, reliable, and sustainable power supply across the country.

With a network spanning thousands of kilometers and exposed to Ireland’s challenging coastal and rural conditions, ESB is leading the modernization of grid operations — adopting digital and data-driven solutions to strengthen network resilience, enable preventive maintenance, and support Ireland’s transition toward a net-zero future.