Drone Based Transmission Line patrolling by POWERGRID

NEW DELHI- Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (POWERGRID) has initiated use of drones for EHV (Extra High Voltage) transmis-sion line patrolling to identify defects using high resolution cameras. 

Drones are being deployed for activities such as tower inspection, clearance measurement & vegetation management. Drones enable effective patrolling of transmission line sections falling under difficult/ unapproachable areas (i.e. valley, hilly, river crossing, flooded areas) as well as areas having right-of-way (RoW) is-sues etc. They are also being deployed for disaster management to carry out tasks such as damage assessment/aerial surveys, emergency line patrolling. POWER-GRID has also developed an Artificial Intelligence based tool which has automated the defect identification process from photographs captured during drone patrol-ling.

POWERGRID presently owns & operate fleet of micro category drones also for routine transmission line patrolling. During month of February 2023, POWERGRID patrolled about 200 towers using its own in-house drones.  
               
The total transmission assets of POWERGRID and its subsidiaries as on February 28, 2023, include 1,73,815 circuit km of transmission lines, more than 2,90,000 EHV towers of various configuration, 271 substations and transformation capacity of 4,93,862 MVA. With the use of state-of-the-art maintenance techniques, auto-mation and digitization, POWERGRID has maintained transmission system availa-bility more than 99%.