Herbicide Drone Helps ComEd Optimize Vegetation Management
Image courtesy of Pacific Southwest Forest Service, USDA under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
Utilities of all shapes and sizes are using drones for an increasing number of tasks, including infrastructure inspections, damage assessment, restoration & recovery, and more. And now the innovative folks at Illinois-based ComEd are piloting something akin to an herbicide drone program to assist with the company’s vegetation management practices. Very interesting indeed!
Background of the ComEd Herbicide Drone
The company launched the herbicide drone pilot in August 2022. The pilot covers about 2 acres of right-of-way land in Forest View, Ill, and the drones can accomplish in less than 1 hour what it would take a “boots-on-the-ground” crew at least 2 days to accomplish, which obviously saves time. The technology also optimizes herbicide usage – what the drone can accomplish with less than one gallon of chemical would require 8 gallons with a typical crew deployment, which obviously reduces costs.
The drones themselves were operated by a third-party company, the Davey Resource Group, and of course the herbicide used was fully approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The pilot area, most of which is a natural prairie, was selected because a large percentage of the vegetation currently growing there is non-native to the area (e.g., buckthorn, box elder, and mulberry plants). The pilot’s objective, in part, is to kill the non-native vegetation and restore the area with seeds from native plants.
According to ComEd, this is the first time that drones for this purpose have been deployed in the Midwest. And if any Midwest utility should be trying out technology like this, it’s ComEd, as the company has approximately 65,000 acres of land that must be maintained.
As you can probably guess, I love this idea! Vegetation management is critical for system reliability and minimizing outages, but it has historically proven to be a costly and time-consuming endeavor. If this process can be made more effective and efficient via an herbicide drone program, all the better!
