Drones to save money by slashing Transmission and Distribution loss
Every year India’s electricity providers suffer a significant amount of transmission and distribution loss. The electricity department of Chandigarh submitted that the T&D loss for 2016–17 was 13.65%.
Imagine the aggregate amount of electricity loss in many cities like Chandigarh!
Electricity loss is also the loss of taxpayer’s money due to mere inefficiency of the workforce employed.
Well, not anymore! With the Drone Regulation 1.0 coming into effect from Dec 1, 2018, drones will become the guardians.
We stand in an era where people are still skeptical about the value addition drones can provide. Companies need to be pushed for considering drone solutions as an alternative to their commercial applications.
One such application is tower inspection.
In this article, we’re going to cover how the drones have the potential to change the outlook of the traditional approach to tower inspection.
Tower Inspection: Traditional Approach
Towers come in all shapes and sizes; different industries put different towers in use. For instance, communication companies install radio and cell towers; electricity providers install transmission towers that are further distinguished according to their size and the voltage of current flowing through them. Such industries use the tower for their daily operations. And therefore, towers demand a preliminary inspection at regular time period to determine where to work upon.
Let’s concentrate, specifically on methods used for inspecting transmission towers, in India.
Once a transmission tower is set up, it is inspected and given a green flag, before putting on live wires. Big corporations still rely on traditional methods of manual inspection also known as ground/monkey patrolling. A thorough inspection is conducted by a walk down survey, and thorough patrolling by climbing on the tower using the internal body of the tower and observing the line components keeping a safe body clearance.
The manual inspection is conducted to determine if the tower was set up properly, by looking for any missing aluminium screws, bolting defects or any missing truss.
Manual inspection is not only dangerous but time-consuming and unreliable as well.
Tower Inspection: Using Drones
1. A drone can be of a great help to find such structural damages, by helping tower inspectors avoid potential climbing hazards. It also enables the inspection team to decide prior; the kind of tools they need to carry while climbing tower.
2. Once a drone provides all the data related to the tower, the tower inspector only has to follow up on the identified issues and address them.
3. Drone inspection will increase the efficiency of tower inspectors while avoiding potential threats to their lives. It will also reduce the time spent in tower inspection, and therefore a large number of towers can be inspected in a given time.
Advantages of using drones for tower inspection
We’ve seen how drone solutions can help the tower inspecting team. Let’s see the improvement brought in by drone data.
- Drones give accurate inspection data as it is based on visual information.
- Inspection is done faster using drones. One can inspect 5 times more towers with the same workforce employed.
- Drone inspection is safer as there is no need for humans to climb up the tower. Everything is assessed from the ground itself with the drones flying in the air.
- Drone inspection is cost-effective; it requires minimum people for inspecting multiple towers.
- Less chance of mistakes since multiple images are taken in recurrent drone flight which can further be thoroughly inspected.
- Unlike traditional methods, drone inspection provides a way to verify any inspection report later as well.
Drone data takes care of all such concerns. Conducting tower inspection using drones will mark another step in the expansion of the industries marked safe by the effective use of drones.
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