State Grid Zhoushan Power Supply Company Independently Develops "Intelligent Early Warning System for Ship Anchor Damage"

Ushering in a New Era of “Digital Intelligent Protection” for Submarine Cable Protection

On October 21, the “Intelligent Early Warning System for Ship Anchor Damage Threats”, independently developed by State Grid Zhoushan Power Supply Company over two years, was officially put into operation. Addressing the long-standing pain points in coastal submarine cable protection—“high missed detection rate in manual inspection and slow emergency response”—the system innovatively integrates multi-source data and AI algorithms to achieve “early detection and rapid disposal” of ship anchor damage risks. It weaves an “intelligent protection network” for over 1,000 kilometers of submarine cables in the sea area of the Zhoushan Archipelago.

As a crucial energy hub in the Yangtze River Delta, Zhoushan has laid key submarine cables in its sea area for transmitting wind power and oil-gas to the Yangtze River Delta region. However, traditional manual inspection relies on empirical judgment and is limited by factors such as weather and visibility, with a missed detection rate once as high as 30%. Moreover, the time from abnormal detection to disposal often lags by several hours, and annual economic losses caused by submarine cable anchor damage accidents reach millions of yuan. The newly launched intelligent early warning system can accurately identify 6 types of high-risk behaviors, including sand dredging, ship grounding, and illegal net fishing, by building a six-dimensional analysis model covering “region, season, date, time point, tidal current direction, and wind direction”. The system not only generates dynamic risk heat maps to intuitively mark high-risk areas but also tracks ship trajectories in real time, predicts anchoring intentions based on historical data, and automatically formulates hierarchical disposal plans such as “Level 1 Alert” and “Level 2 Attention”.

Data from the trial operation shows that the system operates stably and reliably: the accuracy rate of high-risk ship identification reaches 96.7%, it only takes 150 milliseconds from capturing abnormal trajectories to issuing early warnings, the false alarm rate is only 5.8%, and the operation and maintenance efficiency is nearly 5 times higher than that of the traditional model. “In the past, inspection required ‘running till our legs ached’; now the system is like an ‘electronic sentry’ monitoring the sea 24 hours a day,” said an operation and maintenance engineer who participated in the system debugging. Since October, the system has successfully warned of 3 incidents of sand dredgers approaching submarine cables, and operation and maintenance personnel intervened in advance to avoid potential damage.

This system not only solves the problem of ‘inability to effectively monitor’ but also achieves ‘early disposal’,” said a relevant staff member of the company. He added that in the next step, the company will deepen data sharing with maritime and fishery administration departments, promote cross-platform linkage of early warning information, and build a “digital defense line” for power security of major projects such as offshore wind power and oil-gas fields in the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, so as to contribute to the high-quality development of the marine economy. (By Liu Mingkang)