Scalable Geospatial Machine Learning for Power-Line Asset Risk: Integrating Remote Sensing for Lightning and Vegetation Risk Modelling

Electric power networks are increasingly exposed to weather-sensitive failure mechanisms that require asset-level, spatially explicit risk modelling for effective intervention planning. This study contributes a modular, robust, and explainable probability-of-failure (PoF) modelling framework for utility asset management. The central contribution is an asset-level architecture that can be scaled to new environmental data sources and additional PoF types without reworking the underlying pipeline. This is particularly relevant for industry settings, where risk models must remain operationally maintainable while adapting to changing data availability, asset-management priorities, and climate-driven hazard conditions. We demonstrate the framework for vegetation-related and lightning-related failure modes using a harmonised geospatial machine-learning pipeline. The implementation integrates multi-source predictors, including topography (SRTM), vegetation condition (MODIS Normalised Difference Vegetation Index - NDVI), lightning climatology (LIS VHRMC), OpenStreetMap-derived proximity features, and utility operational records. The resulting architecture is computationally efficient, operationally extensible, and suitable for utility-scale deployment. It provides actionable asset-level risk stratification for inspection prioritisation, vegetation management, asset hardening, and resilience planning, supporting earlier intervention and more climate-resilient network operations.