The U.S. electric grid is foundational to public safety, economic continuity and national resilience, underpinning nearly every essential service that modern society depends on, from healthcare and clean water to communications, transportation and emergency response. Yet much of the grid’s physical infrastructure, including large power transformers, breakers, switchgear, protection relays and distribution feeders, is operating at or beyond its original design life, a challenge consistently documented in NERC’s 2024 Long Team Reliability Assessment. Decades of incremental expansion layered onto aging assets have produced a system that is increasingly stressed and uneven in condition.
Aging equipment, shifting operational demands from electrification and distributed energy resources (DERs), intensifying environmental stresses driven by extreme weather and expanding cyber-physical threats are combining to make portions of the system brittle. Extreme weather now exposes latent weaknesses more frequently, while load growth and bidirectional power flows accelerate wear in places that were never designed for it, trends reflected in EIA electricity data. Incremental fixes and calendar-based inspection regimes are no longer sufficient. Utilities need focused, measurable modernization programs that reduce outage risk quickly, withstand regulatory scrutiny, and deliver sustained improvements in reliability.
Rethinking inspections: from calendar checks to continuous assurance
Historically, the industry has relied heavily on scheduled, calendar-based inspections. Crews walk yards, open cabinets and visually inspect assets on a fixed cadence, often annually or every few years. While these routines catch obvious defects, they are intermittent by design and routinely miss slow-developing failure modes that emerge between inspections. Loose connections, phase imbalances and overloaded components can deteriorate quietly for months before manifesting as an outage or catastrophic failure.
SYTIS advocates a different stance: real-time, condition-based monitoring anchored by thermal imaging and targeted sensors. Thermal imagers continuously scan substation buswork, switchgear, breakers and other high-value assets for abnormal heat signatures. These thermal anomalies reveal loose bolted connections, corrosion-driven resistance, overloaded phases and incipient heating that reliably precede electrical failures. Instead of relying on snapshots in time, utilities gain a continuous view of asset health.
Thermal imaging converts vague risk into an identifiable, verifiable signal that dispatch teams and field crews can act upon. It shortens the distance between detection and intervention, allowing utilities to move from reactive maintenance toward prevention without waiting for failures to justify action.
Too often, traditional asset-management approaches rely on abstract risk scores and probabilistic models that are difficult to validate on the ground and slow to translate into action. SYTIS takes a different approach.
We do not sell probabilities. SYTIS’ product is a practical early-warning capability built on clear thermal evidence that a technician can verify in the field. That distinction matters. Rather than telling a utility how likely something is to fail in abstract terms, SYTIS provides direct visibility into degrading conditions in near real time. Utilities can then prioritize interventions based on observed reality, consequence and exposure, preventing failures before customers experience them.
A practical, field-first modernization program
SYTIS recommends a five-stream modernization framework: Assess, Instrument, Modernize, Protect and Operate, as a practical way for utilities to structure sequencing, accountability and governance so modernization efforts translate into measurable operational outcomes rather than disconnected initiatives. This approach aligns with findings in GAO electricity grid report that emphasize the importance of coordinated planning, oversight and accountability in grid modernization efforts. While utilities typically own the assessment phase, SYTIS is purpose-built to support and strengthen the downstreams through continuous detection and operational insight. This structure ensures that technology deployment is tied directly to operational outcomes rather than isolated pilots or standalone tools.
Assessment begins with a systems view. Network models, contingency analysis and overlays of critical customers and public-safety assets, such as hospitals, emergency shelters, data centers and water treatment plants, identify where failures would have the greatest impact. These analyses are combined with historical maintenance records, outage reports and failure forensics so planning starts with what has actually failed, where failures clustered and how those failures propagated.
Instrumentation follows assessment. Thermal imaging is the keystone: it is intuitive for crews, interpretable without opaque algorithms and fast to deploy across substations and critical distribution nodes. Additional sensors can be layered where needed to capture electrical, environmental or mechanical indicators that reinforce thermal findings.
Edge analytics on imager feeds provide automated triage and give operators clear, location-specific insight into emerging issues. Operators can see not only that a problem exists, but exactly where it is developing and how it is trending over time. This enables crews to respond with confidence rather than guesswork, while preserving human judgment by stopping short of automatically generating work orders at this stage.
Modernization then becomes targeted and defensible. Hardware replacement and operational upgrades are driven by consequence and exposure rather than asset age alone. SYTIS helps utilities harden critical assets where a single failure would cause outsized public-safety, reliability or economic harm, ensuring capital is spent where it produces the greatest risk reduction.
Protection and operation close the loop. As assets are upgraded and conditions stabilized, monitoring continues, allowing utilities to confirm that corrective actions delivered the intended reliability benefits and to detect new issues early.
Why SYTIS’ approach delivers
SYTIS’ advantage is operational. We turn continuous, human-verifiable detection into dependable field actions. Thermal imagers provide early, photographable evidence of degradation that crews trust and regulators understand. Operators can prioritize work based on real conditions instead of assumptions, and planners can justify investments with clear before-and-after evidence.
The practical outcomes are tangible: fewer emergency replacements, faster isolation of failing components, reduced outage scope and shorter restoration times. Over time, utilities see a measurable decline in unplanned outages and a shift in maintenance spending from reactive response to planned intervention.
Importantly, SYTIS’ solution is not built around opaque numerical risk scores or probabilistic forecasts that are difficult to validate in the field. It is about producing observable signs of degradation that crews can confirm, repair and track over time, and then measuring the resulting reliability improvements with confidence.
Operational resilience, not probabilistic assertions
SYTIS’ core differentiator is simple and repeatable: early, verifiable detection drives targeted field action, which in turn produces measurable and defensible reliability outcomes.
Modern grid resilience is practical, executable and measurable. SYTIS helps utilities transition from intermittent, calendar-based inspections to continuous, condition-based monitoring anchored by thermal imaging, targeted sensors and OT-aware operational practices. This approach replaces hope with observable early warnings, aligns modernization spending with real-world risk and converts field interventions into sustained reliability gains.
For utility executives and system operators, the result is clear: fewer outages, faster recovery, improved public-safety outcomes and capital investments that demonstrably reduce risk while strengthening trust with regulators and customers alike.
NERC: NERC’s 2024 Long Term Reliability Assessment
EIA: Electricity – U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)