Robot might 'see' power line failures before they happen

Here’s a pretty cool smart technology you’ll never see in your house, although it could do a great deal to help keep your home’s electricity on: a robotic device called LineVue that can “see” the health of the conductor core at the heart of transmission lines.

Developed by a company called Kinectrics, the LineVue was first designed to assess the strength of steel hoisting cables that can mean the difference between life and death for miners. But the remote-controlled device could also offer a quicker, easier way for utilities to determine the thickness of steel in the center of transmission lines.

Knowing that could let transmission operators know whether steel in the lines is corroded, broken or pitted, any of which could lead to line failures.

While the LineVue is still being tested for its effectiveness in transmission line sensing, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has tried out the device in both the lab and field. According to PG&E’s Next100 blog, transmission line engineer Feven Mihretu described the results as “amazing.”

PG&E is also testing a similar device, the LineScout, developed by Canada’s Hydro-Québec Research Institute.

Currently, testing the health of conducting steel in transmission lines requires a field team to actually remove a section of conductor and send it to a lab for analysis. The results, though, apply to only the section that was removed. For overall transmission line health, utilities currently either replace them on a regular schedule — which could mean removing lines that are still in good shape, an unnecessary cost — or are forced to discover there’s a problem when the line fails.