The National Grid is testing computer-manned drones that can save millions in maintenance work.
“We’re moving into a future where these drones will fly themselves all over the countryside,” McKenna says. “But the long-term future of this software is that it will fly people around.”
The network needs constant tune-ups to stay reliable, and regular inspections are important. The National Grid boasts 99.99 percent reliability: something it wants to improve on by locating critical issues long before outages occur. In the UK’s wet climate there’s a high risk of corrosion, which is difficult to stop once it has started. Pylons need to be replaced when the rust has affected their structural integrity, so early detection saves costs in the long run.
But until cost-effective drones are deployed at a large scale, the only option is to use helicopters. A helicopter can inspect 16 pylons every hour at a cost of £2,000 per hour, but flying a VLOS drone is not much better because it’s laborious and slow with the pilot below. On a good day, VLOS drone teams can inspect no more than 10 pylons. “It’s the human element of it that causes the problems,” Mark Simmons, National Grid’s condition monitoring manager, says.
According to David Benowitz, head of research at the research platform Drone Analyst, GPS technology is also not always accurate, especially when being used to measure altitudes or in rural areas with poor satellite coverage. Because there’s always going to be that “bubble of doubt,” he says, there’s a higher risk of collisions in busy airspaces. With more vulnerability comes more risk.
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