In 2025 Southern Company, including Georgia Power and Alabama Power set out with Sense to advanced grid issue detection and localization capabilities designed to identify acute vegetation risks—and other emerging distribution issues—at the transformer level by leveraging Sense’s Waveform AI.
The goals:
Identify vegetation-related risks at the distribution level
Improve localization accuracy within plus or minus 100 meters
Develop early-stage classification for issue type and risk level
As of October 2025, we have confirmed 19 detected events that resulted in utility tickets.
Georgia Power has verified that 15 were vegetation-related. Two additional events were attributed to a squirrel. The remaining two events are under review or categorized as other grid disturbances.
Just as important: we have not missed a confirmed vegetation event.
There are zero false negatives to report.
In parallel, the system has identified 10 additional distribution primary anomalies. They represent early indicators of broader detection capability beyond vegetation-specific issues.
