AEP – 2024 Award Nominee
Transcript
- [suspenseful music] In the middle of the night,
- a static line failure happened at one of the generating facilities at the
- substation.
- It fell across a three hundred and forty-five kV bus.
- This tripped out pretty much everything associated with that bus and also tripped
- out a generating unit. It was a danger at that point.
- Every time there is a major fault like that, there is a risk of failed equipment
- with significant downstream effects.
- This could mean a significant portion of the workforce would have to allocate a
- substantial amount of time and potentially millions of dollars.
- If an employee is in the vicinity of the equipment during a failure, the result
- could be a serious injury or a fatality.
- There are also risks of electrical shock hazards or arc flash.
- These are all things that may not allow somebody to go home at
- the end of their
- shift.
- When the drone was deployed, there was a clear view of the failure points of
- the
- initial static line. With this aerial view, it was clear
- that another static line
- that was adjacent to it was also on the brink of failure,
- which could have
- essentially caused the exact same problem that the first one did.
- With this information, key decisions were made to repair the static line before
- it
- failed, which resulted in avoided costs, saved man-hours, and the
- elimination of another forced
- outage.
- [suspenseful music]
Watch Time
1 Mins 14 Secs