New Fixed-Wing Drone Goes into Service for FPL

Image courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.

Florida Power & Light (FPL), the main energy provider in the state of Florida, recently announced the launch of a new fixed-wing drone that can withstand tropical-force winds to expedite damage assessment and outage restoration efforts.  FPL has always been an innovative company, and this new drone technology is yet another step the company is taking to get ready for a more volatile future.

Details on FPL’s Fixed-Wing Drone

The airplane-shaped drone, called “FPLAir,” is controlled remotely and can fly approximately 1,000 miles and up to 22 hours in single session without refueling – enough to cover the entire length of Florida twice over.  Its mission is to capture images and video evidence of damaged equipment, transmitting the data to the company’s command center for processing in real time.

FPLAir has several advantages over other damage-assessment technologies.  For example:

• Bucket trucks are slow to maneuver, and can be impacted by flooding, debris in the road, evacuation routes, etc.  FPL’s fixed-length drone avoids these issues.
• Satellites cannot “see” through cloud cover, but FPLAir is designed to fly under cloud cover which allows it to capture data where satellites can’t.
• Hand-held drone technology is limited in terms of the conditions within which it’s able to operate – conversely, FPLAir can operate in much more severe weather.

FPLAir can also be pre-deployed such that it can follow on the tail end of a storm to capture damage almost immediately after it happens, allowing crews to be dispatched rapidly to the impacted areas.  This is critical, because when it comes to restoration, speed is the ultimate metric (well, perhaps after safety).

Overall, I applaud FPL for its seemingly never-ending stream of innovative approaches for handling outage situations.  Ever since Hurricane Andrew devastated the state 30 years ago, FPL has amped up its focus on expediting restoration and recovery.  And the company’s new fixed-wing drone is yet another example.