Has Your Drone Program Stalled? It Could be Time to Rethink Your Strategy

Over the past twenty years since the FAA issued the first commercial drone permit, organizations spanning industries from agriculture to construction to public safety have embraced drones to increase the speed, physical reach and safety of their operations. The energy sector is no exception, and many companies have adopted (or are exploring how to adopt) drones to inspect infrastructure from power lines and poles, to wind turbines and solar panels.

In the past, inspections done manually or even with helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft were often labor intensive, slow, and expensive. Now, by deploying drones equipped with high-resolution cameras, LiDAR sensors, and thermal imaging technology, utilities can expedite inspections, improve safety, and increase operational efficiency. In 2023, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) announced a $37.2 million investment in its drone program, indicative of just how critical the industry views this capability.

However, many utilities that add drones to their inspection arsenal reach a point where the program seems to stall. The procurement of the drones, the licensing and pilot training are in place, but what’s missing is a demonstrable ROI. This requires a new way of thinking. In fact, even calling it a “drone program” can be shortsighted. Instead, utilities should view drones as just one component of a larger inspection modernization program – one that requires a lot more than just flying drones and collecting images.

Assessing the Value of Drones for Power Utilities

For those utilities that are still considering adopting drones for infrastructure inspections and image capture, the benefits and advantages are clear.

• Improved Safety for Line Workers and Inspection Crews

Utilities are safety conscious, and many leadership meetings begin by reinforcing safety best practices. Historically, inspection crews would need to physically climb towers to analyze the situation, go back down to determine the right solution, and then head back up to make repairs. But with drones, utility companies can minimize human exposure to these hazardous environments. Rather than sending crews in helicopters, utilities can use drones to identify anomalies in advance, prior to sending a crew to climb the tower. This both saves time and reduces the likelihood of accidents.

• Cost Savings, Operational Efficiency & Risk Management

For T&D teams, their main focus is grid reliability and reducing the total amount of outage minutes. Early detection is key for cost savings, and utilities need to quickly determine problems before smaller anomalies become bigger issues. Drones reduce the need for expensive helicopter inspections and provide faster identification of asset faults, which helps enable proactive maintenance, reduce labor hours, and improve workforce efficiency.

• Enhanced Inspection Accuracy & Environmental Benefits

Drones deliver high-resolution imagery and thermal scanning capabilities, dramatically improving a utility company’s knowledge of asset health and environmental stressors. Now, drones paired with AI-powered software can detect issues such as corrosion, vegetation overgrowth, structural weaknesses, etc., and that data can be automatically tracked over time to improve forecasting models and reduce site visits. And when compared to traditional inspection methods (e.g. fuel-powered trucks, helicopters, and ATVs), drones are a much cleaner alternative and can further reduce a utility’s carbon footprint.

Maximizing Drone ROI

For utilities considering drones, or those that have already adopted and are using drones for inspections, all of the benefits above provide a base level of return on investment. However, it’s a common mistake to try to squeeze more ROI out of the program simply by purchasing more drones, training more pilots, obtaining more licenses, getting more drones into the air and capturing more images. It’s not just a numbers game. In fact, the more drones you have, taking more pictures (that have to then be analyzed), the more your ROI will diminish without the systems in place required to activate all the data.

This is where rethinking the concept of a drone program comes into play. It’s an easy mistake to think of a drone program in a box or as a be all end all. The truth is that drones need to be thought of as a single (albeit important) part of a larger strategic inspection modernization program. It’s inspections that utilities are really needing to scale. Drones may not always be the best tool for every kind of inspection, but they are incredible for capturing detail and hard to detect anomalies, as well as capture many more high-quality images per structure than helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft.

It’s important to not forget about what comes AFTER a utility starts to use drones. Because of this exponential increase in images captured by drones, utilities eventually face a bottleneck where it’s no longer physically possible to manually analyze all of the image data. This happens around 10,000 images per month where analysis needs to be automated. To truly maximize the ROI of the drones being used for inspections, utilities need to ensure other processes and systems are in place and have the ability to scale those systems along with their use of more drones. This includes:

1. A Clear Strategy and Roadmap for Inspection Modernization
   • Identify key inspection use cases and what tools are the best for capturing different types of images (T&D infrastructure, substations, vegetation management, etc.)
   • Align on measurable achievable goals for efficiency, safety and risk management.
   • Create “shot lists” of all utility assets that need to be filmed by drones (including camera angles, locations, and any other relevant details) to improve planning, enhance communications, and increase efficiency.
2. Scalable Infrastructure for Consolidated Data Storage & Automated Image Analysis
   • Understand where all disparate inspection image data exists. This can often be spread out across multiple servers, external hard drives, PCs, etc.
   • Have a strategy for consolidating, migrating and storing data in the cloud. This is needed both for storage capacity but also for the ease of eventually automating the analysis of inspection image data and activating. Cloud deployments become essential when dealing with complex, data-intensive applications such as the AI-powered software needed to automate massive amounts of image data.
3. A Strategy for Change Management
   • Many times, internal silos within utilities can be another barrier to maximizing the ROI of drones for inspections. Drone programs often sit with asset management teams or teams that are responsible for piloting and maintaining the drones. On the other hand, the teams that are in charge of implementing larger strategies around inspections, or things like cloud migration or AI solutions sit on completely separate teams.
   • Having executive support and a plan for change management for inspection modernization to start bridging these gaps internally is vital for success. This includes impact analysis, cross-functional training and a possible phased implementation when it comes to modernizing inspections (where drones are part of a phase that happens in tandem with the other systems).

Ready for Liftoff

Adopting drones can be a game-changer for inspecting infrastructure, but they must be implemented within a larger context of inspection modernization (and all that entails) to achieve long-term ROI. Success depends on utilities undertaking a holistic evaluation of all that’s involved, including a larger plan and infrastructure to get the program “off the ground.” By investing that time at the beginning of the process, utilities can avoid costly missteps down the road when it’s time to scale, ensuring the company reaches new heights of safety and efficiency during infrastructure inspections.