Why Electrical Utilities are using drones in inspections and maintenance.
A Danish non-profit choosing danish-designed airdata management software.
When it comes to managing thousands of kilometers of electric transmission and distribution powerlines, electrical utilities look for innovative ways of performing inspections and maintenance, to keep power flowing to their millions of consumers.
The use of drones for inspections is part of one such innovative solution, which is becoming increasingly recognized around the world.
Drones provide safe and efficient means of capturing high-quality inspection data and minimizes the time it takes to capture it. Overall, they
lower operation costs and simultaneously eliminate safety hazards.
Historically speaking, power companies have been using manpower on crane trucks or helicopters to perform aerial inspections. These traditional methods are slow and tedious to manage, not to mention the potential safety risks to the personnel.
Helicopters are another, expensive, option. This is true whether utilities rent or hire these services, or procure the helicopter(s) and manpower to support the operations and maintain the assets.
These days, Utility companies have now fully accepted and implemented the use of drones for capturing inspection data (images). This data is analysed by expert engineers for any visual issues and provided in a final cloud interface report, that includes a listing of each structure, visual and thermal imagery with annotations of the type of damage, pole type, severity
of damage via a ranking system and the latitude/longitude of each structure. It’s the most efficient way of managing T&D assets in 2021.
Scopito Cares
While we enjoy boasting about the advantages and benefits of using Scopito, it is perhaps even more important that we express our passion for helping our clients succeed with this vital component of their operation that is maintenance.
We understand what it means to offer excellent service to our customers. If even one household or merchant is without power, that is an unhappy customer. We care about helping you alleviate the pain of outages and keep every house on the streets supplied. At Scopito, we know this task can only be accomplished with excellent capture, through analysis and comprehensive, informative reporting. Regular inspection and maintenance are how you keep your assets healthy and the light on.
We are passionate people who are continuously challenging ourselves to improve our services, developing and writing new code, making the most meaningful and intelligent data available to you at your fingertips. We sit at the table with you, discussing your specific and unique mission and vision. It is important to us to ensure that our services are relevant to your business because that’s how we keep our customer’s “lights on”.
Your success is our success. If you’re thinking about adding Scopito to your team, reach out to us here and we have can a talk about your specific needs and requirements.
But don’t take Our word for it. Here’s what Energinet has to say
In recent years, Energinet has come to rely increasingly on drone inspections for the maintenance of power lines, and the Scopito software platform has proven to be a valuable tool for managing the data from those inspections.
Mads Lykke Pedersen, who is in charge of inspecting all power lines in Jutland, explains:
“Drone maintenance inspections are a clever, safe and cost-effective way of doing power line inspections, but they tend to generate vast numbers of images. In fact, once you’re done with an inspection run, you can have thousands of images on your drive. This is not very useful unless you can somehow tag and sort these images in a useful way. We use Scopito for this.”
Mads Lykke Pedersen
– Energinet
Let the experts stay in their office
Mads Lykke Pedersen, who is in charge of inspecting all power lines in Jutland, explains:
“Drone maintenance inspections are a clever, safe and cost-effective way of doing power line inspections, but they tend to generate vast amounts of data. In fact, once you’re done with an inspection run, you can have thousands of images on your drive. Those are not very useful unless you can somehow tag and sort them. We use Scopito for this.”
In the case of the power lines crossing the Limfjord in Northern Jutland, the power of the Scopito platform became evident.
Using drones, Energinet.dk managed to capture thousands of images of power lines crossing the water at a height of almost 100 meters without the need for cranes or for interruptions to the power supply.
“For instance, we found damage from lightning strikes that we could inspect at our leisure using the images captured by the drones,” says Mads Lykke Pedersen. “And because the images were GPS-tagged, we could pinpoint precisely where the problems were, which will make it much easier and more cost-effective to perform the necessary repairs when we have to.”
A tool for traditional and new inspection images alike
But the strengths of the platform are not confined to drone images. Energinet.dk often uses traditional helicopter inspections and ground-based photo shoots to document the condition of power lines, and Scopito is ideal for storing and sharing this type of inspection data as well as data.
“We perform more and more drone maintenance inspections, but we also still take images using helicopter runs and photography from the ground. After that, it’s just a question of uploading the GPS-tagged images to the Scopito platform. That way we can keep full control of our inspection data and share them with colleagues and repair crews.”
By analysing their data, Energinet found evidence of wear on the conductor wires of a kind, that hadn’t been noticed before.
“We found that the conductors had a surface that seemed almost to have been sandblasted,” says Mads Lykke Pedersen. “For that, we needed outside experts to take a look at the damage – specifically, an expert placed in Canada. But where we would have had to fly him in back in the old days, now we could just email a web link to him and ask him to take a look at the images on his monitor in his own office.
This saved a lot on travel and fees and cut down the time for the diagnosis quite significantly.”
Energinet is just one of our 5,000+ successful client relationships. We are literally working with client organizations globally, with offices in the U.S. and Europe. Please call us today to discuss how we can help you with your inspection and maintenance strategy.
