The use of a drone has helped Mid-Ohio Energy Cooperative diagnose issues on their 140-foot-tall communications tower. (Photo by Brett Ransome)
There is a 140-foot-tall communications tower positioned at Mid-Ohio Energy Cooperative’s substation in Ada that’s vital to the co-op’s mission to provide reliable electric service to its more than 8,000 owner-members.
At the top are two radios that are part of Mid-Ohio Energy’s microwave communications network — one that communicates with another substation, and another that points back to the co-op office in Kenton — and unless both are working, the co-op would have difficulty communicating with critical systems at several substations.
Brent Ransome, manager of operations technology at Mid-Ohio Energy, remembers the bitterly cold day last winter when one of those radios went out. Had there been an outage at the substation, the broken radio would have meant delays in getting power restored on a day when heat was an utter necessity.
Usually, that would mean sending a two-man crew to climb up the tower and assess the situation, get them back down to order any necessary equipment, wait for it to arrive, and then re-climb the tower to install the equipment or make repairs.
“In winter, we really try to avoid climbing the towers,” Ransome says. “It’s difficult and dangerous in the best of conditions, and the cold weather makes it much worse. The gear is heavier, your clothes are heavier, so it’s a tough workout. Anything we can do to not climb, we will do.”
Fortunately, a few months earlier, Ransome had approached Mid-Ohio Energy’s president and CEO, John Metcalf, with an idea to purchase a camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone; among its many uses, the drone could be used to make those initial visual inspections.
“What we had before was just not the most efficient process,” Metcalf says. “It was time-consuming, hazardous, and expensive.”
The drone they purchased is small, about 12 inches square, with four rotors and a camera. Ones like it are available in just about any electronics retailer, and prices have continually fallen as the technology has improved.
So they sent up the drone, watching the live video feed in real time, and saw a cable had snapped. “It’s hard to tell how it happened, but we were able to see exactly what we needed to make the repairs,” Ransome says. “It saved our guys a trip up there, and we were able to get that whole job done in about half the time.”
Ransome and the Mid-Ohio Energy crews pull out the drone about once a week, Metcalf says. They use it to inspect distribution lines, transformers, substations, and communications towers. After severe storms, they send the drone to inspect its poles and wires that cross remote areas, such as the two state wildlife areas in the co-op’s territory.
“When we fly a drone over a communications tower, or to review off-road rights-of-way, or to inspect substations, we get a very clear idea of what we’re up against before we start a job. The resolution is incredible,” Metcalf says. “If we can see the problem before we start work, we can repair equipment faster, and that translates into improved reliability and bottom-line savings for our members.”
