AEP deploys autonomous drones to optimize outage response
In the face of an unexpected event, quickly understanding the condition of assets is a critical factor to restore power and minimize forced outages — helping avoid millions of dollars in labor, materials, and CMI, and lowering risk for your personnel and your grid.
Watch how American Electric Power Station Technical Services uses drones to optimize their response to a static line failure, quickly capturing information to prevent another failure before it starts. When every minute counts, AEP relies on autonomous drones to conduct critical inspections and deliver safe, reliable, affordable power to their customers.
Learn more about how to improve reliability and resilience in utilities.
- [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