Revolutionizing Utilities Inspection: Unveiling the ROI Assessment of Drone-Based Programs

The energy & utilities industry provides vital resources that help society function, such as electricity, oil, natural gas, steam, water, and wastewater disposal. Since all of these involve large, robust infrastructures operating at high temperatures, high voltage, and/or high velocities, site inspections can be a dangerous task for humans to carry out. Moreover, a temporary or permanent shutdown (due to inspections or overlooked critical damage) might be required—and we all know that downtime means no revenue.

However, poised to take the biggest share of $6B from the $41.3B the commercial drone market will reach by 2026, the drones in energy & utilities industry shows how drones have become a valuable tool to shift from tedious, time-consuming, and expensive, to efficient, automated, enriching, and safer inspections.

When dealing with drone operations, time saved, safety, and costs are the three main areas you need to look at to prove ROI. In our “How Can You Measure the ROI of Your Drone-Based Farming Program?” article, we mentioned that the way you look at these areas differs depending on the use case and main goals. It is important to understand how a drone may benefit the use case at hand before even thinking of buying one or setting up a drone program. The same methodology applies here and in any other industry.

But how exactly can you measure ROI in the energy & utilities industry?

In the early days, visual inspections were unavoidably manual tasks, where teams would be dispatched to inspect assets in person. This included climbing dangerous, tall, and/or difficult-to-access infrastructures, inspecting vegetation, and covering tens of miles per day on foot, or by vehicle. For utilities operating smaller-sized grids, this may be perfectly practical, but with larger grids, it quickly becomes impossible to cover large distances efficiently and/or inexpensively in a short time. Using a helicopter makes visual inspections easier, but it still results in a possibly dangerous and expensive manual process, where gathering the volume of information needed to truly monitor an entire grid can be tricky. That’s where drones come in.

Read More over at Commercial UAV >> https://www.commercialuavnews.com/energy/how-can-you-measure-the-roi-of-your-utilities-inspection-program-using-drones