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China Energy News (11th edition, July 15, 2024)

Two heavy-load drones jointly lifted electrical supplies.

Our newspaper reports: "Tower materials and insulators are ready, take off!" On July 7, accompanied by a roar, at the gate of the 500 kV Ningzhou substation in Yuxi City, Yunnan Province, two heavy-loaded drones, like eagles spreading their wings, "holding hands" loaded with tower materials, from the foot of Yangcaolin Mountain in Dazongduo Village, Huaning County. Two or three minutes later, they crossed the dense forest and transported 300 kilograms of tower materials to the destination on the top of the mountain.

The multi-rotor electric drone that "flies with two wings" this time is the latest heavy-load drone for electric power transportation jointly developed by the Yunnan Power Grid Company of the State Grid Corporation of China and Liant (Fujian) Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. This heavy-load transport drone has a single rated load of 230 kg. However, since Yunnan is located in a plateau area with thin air, the payload will be reduced to 70%-90% of the rated load, and the tower materials to be hoisted have reached 300 kg. In order to ensure the feasibility of flight transportation operations while taking into account operation safety and efficiency, the site adopts a dual-machine joint hoisting operation method for electric heavy-load transport drones to transport tower materials. This is also the first innovative application of power engineering in China.

"This 200-kilogram multi-rotor UAV uses electricity as its power source and can effectively meet the needs of short-distance, high-drop, and high-frequency operations. A single UAV can carry out 150 flights a day and operate continuously for 8 hours." Wang Fangmin, senior manager of the Technical and Economic Research Office of the Planning and Construction Research Center of Yunnan Power Grid Company, introduced that the successful implementation of this operation broke through the "ceiling" of the payload of a single UAV, laid the foundation for the realization of "three-machine joint lifting" and "four-machine joint lifting" in the future, and realized the transformation of the transportation operation mode on construction sites in the power grid field.

Yunnan's overall topography is dominated by mountains, hills and canyons, with large undulating terrain and large differences in altitude. The province's power transmission and distribution lines are nearly 400,000 kilometers long, and more than 70% are built between mountains and rivers. It is precisely this terrain that makes the transportation of power transmission line construction materials a problem.

Faced with such complex terrain, in the past, where there were no roads in the mountains, people had to rely on people to carry goods on their backs or on horses. For example, in this lifting operation, the surface distance was more than 2 kilometers, but the straight-line distance was only 300 meters. Using drones can shorten the transportation time from the original two or three hours to two or three minutes.

Since 2022, heavy-load drones have been used in the process of power construction. Yunnan Power Grid Company has conducted scenario testing and performance verification on more than 20 heavy-load drone models in combination with different altitudes and complex terrain conditions, and has applied them on a large scale in the field of power grid construction. The current application scope has covered 10 prefecture-level cities including Kunming, Yuxi, Wenshan, Chuxiong, and Lijiang, with a total of more than 10,000 take-offs and landings, a transport weight of more than 1,000 tons, and a reduction in forest felling of more than 500 cubic meters.

"The widespread use of heavy-load drones in Yunnan has made useful explorations into the engineering design and mechanized construction of future overhead transmission line construction, and has set an example for building a low-altitude economic ecological system in the power sector. This has also provided solid technical support for the formulation of quota standards required to promote the use of heavy-load drones on a larger scale in the future." said Zhang Jigang, a third-level leading professional and technical expert at the Energy Development Research Institute of the State Grid Corporation of China.

In the next step, Yunnan Power Grid Company will continue to innovate the power grid construction operation methods, strive to achieve more high-tech breakthroughs such as the combined flight transportation of heavy-load drones + helicopters, and effectively serve the development of Yunnan's low-altitude economy.

(Chen Bo, Li Chen, Dai Wei, Yan Pei)

(Contact number of China Energy News: 010-65369450, Email: [email protected], Address: People's Daily, No. 2 Jintai West Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing)