Gupta added that they were thinking of using drones not just in the transmission side of the business but also in distribution.Īs of now, Tata Power owns two drones, both DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise models. We intend to train the model by loading more and more images into the model,” Gupta said.Īs for personnel, she said that Tata Power plans to nominate two officers who would be trained as drone pilots. And since we have a good in-house infrastructure, we intend to kind of develop the portal for image analytics. “We intend to optimise that cost because we are a regulated business, and we can't afford to be giving that much cost to services. The company will not hire service providers again, because it found that 50 percent of the total cost of the pilot project was attributable to the data analytics platform hired from a service provider. With drones, she added, they were able to.Īs part of ramping up operations, Tata Power plans to buy drones and develop an in-house data analytics platform. However, with drones we incurred an expense of only Rs 5,” she said.Įven though Tata Power has bluetooth-enabled meter readers in a few areas, Gupta informed that due to limitations in distance and network, they were not able to manually read meters. “Earlier, we were giving around Rs 8 per meter reading. “We have really been able to understand how the electricity connection from one cable is being tapped and being taken to another place.”Īs for remote meter reading in rural areas, Tata Power was able to save around 30 percent in cost with the help of drones. We were able to capture that with the drone,” she said. With many states subsidising power connections for farming, Gupta said that connections taken for tube wells were being extended to nearby houses. But with drones, we can really capture and can take those images without anyone in the public noticing us,” Gupta pointed out.ĭuring the pilot, Tata Power was also able to detect power theft in rural areas involving connections taken for tube wells or irrigation. However, there is a limitation when we conduct these raids as the lines are amid communities. “Generally, we used to conduct raids in the late evenings, late nights or early mornings. In the Odisha discom leg of the pilot, Tata Power took up detection of power theft in remote locations. Also, the company made big savings on fuel for vehicles to visit the spots. Gupta said against the seven or eight towers that could be inspected under manual operations, with drones they were able to inspect 10 to 11 towers. During the drone pilot project, Tata Power was able to identify defects such as power tripping and broken insulators, apart from detecting hotspots and foreign objects such as stuck kites or birds’ nests, and so on. “We could make the drone fly and capture images of those vulnerable towers especially, which were otherwise very unsafe to climb,” she said. Taking up manual power maintenance in these areas is a cumbersome process and is unsafe as well, she said. Some of the towers in West Bengal were also submerged as a result of floods. These are lines that cut across forests and tough terrains, remote villages, farmlands, irrigation canals and so on,” Gupta said. But this 10 percent is the most critical and vulnerable. “These represent only 10 percent of total towers. Gupta also highlighted privacy and other policy-related issues that may arise as a result of such operations, and delays arising out of the DigitalSky platform under the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, and wants the government to address them.īetween November 2021 and March 2022, with two drones hired from a service provider, Tata Power took up operations and maintenance (O&M) of power lines from Delhi, GIS survey of Odisha power distribution companies or discoms which includes detecting power theft, and remote meter reading in rural areas.Īlong the 1,166 km Delhi line of Powerlinks Transmission-which runs from Siliguri in West Bengal to Purnea and Muzaffarpur in Bihar, then to Lucknow, Bareilly and Mandola (about 30 km from the capital) in Uttar Pradesh-visual and thermal inspection of around 225 towers and line corridors were taken up using drones. However, Tata Power is still concerned about adopting Indian-made drones over foreign-made ones citing quality issues. Powerlinks Transmission is a joint venture between Tata Power and Power Grid Corporation of India. After undertaking proof of concept for over five months, Tata Power is gearing up to start full-fledged drone operations for maintaining power lines, checking on theft of lines, remote power meter reading, and so on.Īpart from buying its own drones, the company plans to develop its in-house drone infrastructure with a dedicated AI-based data analytics module and appointing its own drone pilots, Kiran Gupta, the CEO and executive director of Powerlinks Transmission, told Moneycontrol.
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