Using Recovery Drones to Accelerate Outage Restoration

Image courtesy of Nicholas Erwin under Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivs 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.

More and more electric utilities are utilizing recovery drones to help accelerate power restoration.  These devices reduce the need for manual damage assessment, and they enable fast decision making based on real time data.

How Recovery Drones Help the Cause

In the best-case scenario, drones can essentially serve as a utility’s first responders.  This not only reduces costs, but it also enhances safety because there is less reliance on physical inspections to assess damage.  These types of devices can even be docked at strategic locations, ready to be remotely activated and deployed quickly when needed.

Thanks to the speed of dispatch, the condition of wires, switches, substations and other components can be assessed without the need for direct human intervention.  And in the meantime, data can be captured and relayed in real time so that labor and resource decisions can be optimized.

Recovery drones and similar remotely-controlled devices not only sound great in theory, but they have also been successfully utilized in real world situations.  For example, they were dispatched during Hurricane Harvey to enable damage assessment despite the flooded and debris-filled roadways that plagued the region during that time.

Aside from outage recovery, this type of technology can also provide a boost to reliability by identifying potential faults and malfunctions before they actually occur, facilitating proactive repairs.

According to the article linked above, the most important 3 factors utilities should consider when developing a recovery drone program or partnership include:

• The drones themselves must be easy and intuitive to fly, and come equipped with autonomous navigational features built in.
• The drone partner must prioritize security, utilize best-in-class data encryption techniques, and be SoC2 Type II compliant and ISO 27001 certified.
• The technology should incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) to help organize and analyze captured data.

The bottom line is that utilities should be leveraging any and all technologies that can accelerate outage restoration at a reasonable cost, and it sure sounds like recovery drones should be considered to be part of the mix.