Measure, a leading international provider of aerial intelligence, has completed a drone flight in the DC Metropolitan Flight Restricted Zone (FRZ) as a result of a waiver granted by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Systems Operations Security unit.
A drone zapped out of the sky, equipment damaged en route, last-minute deployments, excessive heat, reams of data, and a host of other challenges marked the largest solar farm inspection we have performed to date.
Today, energy companies are using drones to capture data that was previously dangerous, difficult, or expensive to obtain. But what is drone data, exactly? And what’s the benefit of this new treasure trove of data?
A career as a Drone Pilot can be very rewarding for the right person.
Click here to download this study as a PDF.
UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) technologies provide operational efficiency gains to solar asset management. To quantify these gains, Measure compared time, costs, and results of its 100% IR drone inspections to relevant manual inspection scenarios across four solar sites. These comparisons, documented below, yielded the following results:
The energy industry is conservative when it comes to cyber security, and although the ROI of drone usage is overwhelmingly acknowledged in the industry, there are still many concerns around managing data of critical infrastructure.
Using traditional methods, a boiler inspection is a long process: 3 days for the boiler to cool off; 2 days to install scaffolding, up to 4 days to do the inspection, and another 2 days to remove the scaffolding. And then there is the cost of all that downtime, about $30,000 per day in net profit loss for a typical 500 MW coal plant.
This process requires up to 40 contractors, numerous hazardous man-hours, and a great financial investment; the costs involved with the scaffolding alone can be upwards of $140,000, depending on the size of the boiler.
But energy companies can use drones to cut inspection time 4 days to 1, with no scaffolding required. Hazardous man-hours are drastically reduced and inspections can be completed at a fraction of the cost.
Measure UAS, Inc. has secured a 4-year subcontract agreement with LS Technologies under the SE2025 Systems Engineering contract to provide the following support to the Federal Aviation Administration:
As shared by: Andy Justicia, Lead Pilot for sUAS Training and Standards
