| | November 20158CIOReviewImagine you need to inspect and possibly repair a large and critical electrical wire. There are hospitals, businesses and households depending on your work. Now imagine that wire is suspended 120 feet up in the air and you are teetering next to it in a small bucket at the end of a long, articulated boom crane. By the way, thousands of volts of electricity are pulsating through the wire.Routine inspection and maintenance for power companies is anything but a routine. Given the size, positioning and force of electricity producing and distributing assets, many interactions with them are by definition hazardous. Inspecting and monitoring far-flung assets like wind turbines, hydroelectric dams and reservoirs, power plants, and thousands of miles of overhead power transmission lines is a chal-lenging, yet vital task. Electricity is the backbone of modern industrial society. When storms and maintenance cause unplanned outages, minutes matter and entire cities can be impacted. AES is one of the largest providers of electricity in the world, providing power to tens of millions of people in 18 countries. AES' mission is to be the world's leading sustainable power company that safely provides reliable and affordable energy. We also strive do so in a way that abides by our values. First among these values is safety--for our people, contractors and communities.Frequent inspection of assets enables us to proactively identify issues or defects before they become a significant risk to our operations or to the reliability of the power it produces. Traditionally, these tasks have called for our skilled technicians to work under dangerous conditions, rappelling down structures, scaling up temporary scaffolding or working from suspended platforms. Challenges like these have driven AES to look for 21st century solutions to take our people out of dangerous situations. AES has pioneered approaches to inspection using remotely piloted aircraft systems, commonly known as drones. Inspection using drones reduces the need for our people to work at height and minimizes their risk of exposure to high voltage electricity. These significantly safer inspections, when performed by professional operators using commercial-grade drones, have also enabled proactive maintenance by more quickly, more accurately, and more comprehensively identifying repairable issues before they become operational or safety concerns.We have successfully leveraged drones and advanced robotics at more than 60 of our locations and across seven Leveraging Drones to Increase Safety and ProductivityBy Hugo Vasquez, Deputy CIO, The AES CorporationIn MyOpinion
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