Citipower & Powercor are an Australian power company based in Melbourne. Their network of poles, wires and infrastructure distribute power to electricity meters and in doing so, supply energy to 1.2 million Victorian homes and businesses.
Efficient and accurate inspections of their power poles is vital for identifying wear, damage and faults, triggering maintenance workflows and reducing potential downtime of their asset network.
Citipower & Powercor were completing their asset inspections on foot, with inspectors manually visiting every power pole and, where possible, taking photographs from the ground using DSLR cameras and/or smart phones and tablets. However, this approach was time consuming and lacked top-down and aerial visibility of the poles. What’s more, their imagery was spread across different systems and teams, which meant maintenance workflows were clunky and data was easily lost or difficult to find.
Citipower & Powercor came to Birdi for a streamlined solution for their power pole inspection and maintenance process, and to ensure their geospatial data was managed in a centralized system for compliance and tracking purposes.
With Birdi, Citipower & Powercor were able to:
Birdi’s solution helped Citipower & Powercor in the following ways:
"Birdi has been great for us. Of the 11,000 power poles captured, we 4X increased our asset inspection rate and improved our defect identification by 15%."
Luke Skinner
CitiPower, Powercor and United Energy
Birdi utilized their Australian drone pilot network for this project. Pilots were matched for each capture region based on their experience and locality. Birdi’s pilot network completed approx 2,000 drone flight missions to capture aerial imagery of over 11,000 power poles, with approximately 80 poles captured per day across both metro and rural areas.
Over 90,000 drone images were captured (with an average of 7 photos per asset) and uploaded into Citipower & Powercor’s workspace for visualization. The geo-referencing details within each image enabled them to be visualized on the map at their precise capture location, providing important contextual information for Citipower & Powercor.
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Citipower & Powercor configured Birdi’s Asset Assessment register and criteria to match their own defect library. This provided their inspectors a high degree of familiarity even when operating in a new platform and allowed for a simpler integration of identified defects with their SAP maintenance system.
Their inspectors then conducted remote assessments of each power pole. When faults were encountered, an inspector would:
Once each inspection was complete, the details were then exported into an assessment PDF report and shared with the maintenance team for review and in-field correction.
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With Birdi, Citipower & Powercor were able to:
If you’re a power company and interested in making similar improvements in your network operations, get in touch with our team.