Southern Co. granted “game-changing” FAA waiver for autonomous drone inspections
O&M

Southern Co. granted “game-changing” FAA waiver for autonomous drone inspections

A new waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gives Southern Company the ability to perform drone inspections at the utility’s power plants and other facilities without the need for someone onsite.

The utility plans to install docks onsite at its plants to enable inspections. The docks can be compared to aircraft hangars for drones.

For the last year, Southern Co. has used Plant Barry in Alabama as the test site to capture data and prove to the FAA this technology could be used safely.

The utility called the latest development a “huge step” in advancing autonomous and remote operations at scale.

Mat Spurlock, Sr. UAS Pilot for Southern Company, told Power Engineering inspections now can be done remotely from a control center, keeping employees out of potentially hazardous environments. Previously, a pilot and visual observer had to be onsite.

“Efficiency and safety are the two drivers for this,” he said.

For example, proactive inspections of cooling towers, turbines, dry cask storage at nuclear facilities or panels at solar farms could be done more often and efficiently.

At a nuclear plant’s dry cask storage facility, inspections are conducted on a daily occurrence, with a radiation protection technician, engineer and security officer all needed onsite. Now, a dock could be installed at the plant, with a drone completing that mission and delivering data automatically to the engineer.

“The goal is to build a [machine learning] model to even eventually remove the engineer from having to inspect that data,” said Spurlock. “It would point out, this is different than it was yesterday, or this is an obstructed vent.”

Spurlock also noted the benefit of O&M cost reductions, with multi-day processes reduced to 45 minutes.

“Say we have a fault in the switchyard at a plant, we can immediately launch that aircraft, go to that location and try to determine what caused it without sending personnel out there,” said Spurlock. “Then when we do dispatch personnel or equipment, we already know what they’re getting into.”

The only two notifications required for an inspection would be NOTAMS, or notifications to other pilots if there’s an airport nearby, and to Southern Company’s own personnel where the drone will be launched.

Spurlock said future inspections will be pre-programmed. Inspectors could view the flights in real-time or examine the post-process data after it’s recovered.

“It’s really just game-changing to us,” he said.

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