For the project of ADL 18 Solution Fluency, I was partnered with Noah Jette and we decided to do our project on how we could improve utility poles.

Defining our problem:
Our problem for this task is to figure out a way that we can improve on utility poles. Utility poles are the poles that support the overhead wires to provide us many different sources of energy. With these poles, there are many problems that can occur from a car running into it to the weather damaging it. Once these tragedies happen, many different areas get affected with a power outage. This happens because the utility poles are all connected to substations for where they get the power from. Once a utility pole malfunctions/breaks, someone has to physically go drive around to try to fix the problem for everyone to regain power. We are trying to figure out a way to make this process more efficient because it takes way to long and with power out for a long time it can be dangerous. We are also going to try to figure out is how to protect these poles and try to make it so there are less problems and less customers go out with power. Our ultimate goal is to find a way to get houses to all have power even if a utility pole goes out.

Here is the Microsoft Sway that we used to gather our information :

(In this Sway is discover, dream and deliver.)

Our idea was to put little sensors on utility poles so when there is movement on the sensors, BC Hydro would be notified and be able to fix the problem. The censors would be able to detect any movement so if the utility pole is broken or fell down we could tell and it would be linked up to the cables so it could make sure there is power getting passed through the cable. This idea would cost quite a bit of money because there is 900 000 utility lines that you would have to put the sensors on but we believe that this would be worth it considering the current method of sending someone out in a truck to look for the problem is very inefficient.

Here is a picture of what our idea might look like:

(Original Picture)

During the process of making this project, I think that me and Noah did a really good job at working together to gather information. We both worked a equal amount on the Sway and we both found quality information and cited our sources. I believe that we did a really good job on this project and had a good result. We were also very good at sharing our information that we found. We would talk to each other about what we were researching and knew everything the other person knew. What we could have done better was think of more solutions for this problem because we did not put that much time into it and put more time into finding more information. This project has definitely improved my skills of finding solutions to problems because we had very little time to do this and the project worked out quite well. I also worked very well with my partner and hope we get to do more projects like this one because I enjoyed it very much.