The first time Tim Bedford heard of grid monitoring company Gridware, he was running operations strategy for PG&E’s wildfire program.
It was 2023, and Gridware, founded three years earlier, was about to run a pilot with the utility, installing roughly 450 of its GridScope sensors on poles across the Northern California utility’s territory. The devices would monitor vibration, sound, and the electrical field around each pole, helping the utility find faults on its lines faster.
But Bedford was skeptical. “I was not a believer,” he told Latitude Media. “This is too good to be true.”
In his long career at PG&E, which he’d started over 30 years ago as a student hire, Bedford had held many roles, including lineman. From the field, he’d witnessed several similar-looking sensors try and fail to deliver what they promised.
“Sensors that attach directly to the line will give you a sectional line that may be three miles,” he said. “But it never got…to the level that the field was able to get the usable information. They told us about it, but we saw no benefit on the side of the field.”
