Every year, during the month of August, Villa de Leyva is filled with tourists arriving for the famous Wind and Kite Festival. This event has become famous in the Bogotá Savannah for the richness of the figures that fly around the town and the number of people who congregate there to tour its streets. Many of the visitors come from Cundinamarca and Bogotá, where the kiting is also a typical tradition during a month famous for its strong winds. The capital city parks welcome families who practice this activity, and in the streets and neighborhoods throughout the department people raise kites of varied shapes based on the year’s trends or the imagination of their creator. Kites should always be raised in open spaces, because when they fly near power grids there is a risk that they will become entangled in the cables. This happens frequently, and in addition to representing a risk for the person holding the rope, it can cause short circuits that leave many users without power.
To avoid cuts in the supply and risks to people, it is necessary to quickly remove the kites from the electrical wiring. This work is usually carried out with ladders or torches, and it can take 15 to 20 minutes per kite. Since 2018, however, when we launched the dragon drone, we have accelerated the kite removal work and reduced the risks for our operators. The drone, which launches a controlled fire flame, allows the removal of entangled objects in the cables without damaging the electrical infrastructure, and decreases the time per kite from 15 to 3-5 minutes, including the displacement time from one point to another. This translates into a great effectiveness that was demonstrated last year, when it helped remove 147 kites in just 17 days.
Devices that improve service provision
The dragon is one of several drones with which we have innovated in the provision and maintenance of the energy service in Bogotá and Cundinamarca. The department, with its mountainous terrain, presents many challenges for our operators that help guarantee the continuity of the service. Thanks to the drones we have been able to improve our response when failures or needs are reported and we have also managed to reduce the risks of accidents and cuts in the supply. Failure reporting, for example, involves the mobilization of crews that seek the cause of the damage or interruption, identify the type of solution required and transport the materials necessary for the reactivation of the service. In order to carry out these activities, operators sometimes have to overcome a series of obstacles that, due to the remote places where we provide the service, range from uncovered roads or trails, to the risk of slipping on slopes or falling into rivers. Because of these issues, we at Enel-Codensa, in association with Tomas Aéreas S.A.S., began to develop drone technologies tailored to our needs and those of our customers since May 2017.
For the laying of a single kilometer of electric cable, for example, a conventional operation can take from three to five days, depending on terrain and weather conditions: rain, the trail and the mountains are all obstacles that delay the operation. Today, however, thanks to the weaver drone, which carries a wire guide for these tasks, we can lay a kilometer of cable in less than 32 minutes: a great optimization in time that translates into greater efficiency and speed. And in parallel to the weaver drone, we developed the owl drone, which is used to inspect and record the work of the crews, a task that is permanently carried out by Enel-Codensa officials.
The last drone we launched was the firefly drone, which allows us to search for and identify failures during the night. To achieve this, we adapted high-power LED lights to a drone that also records and shows online where the faults are, which can be both busted cables and fallen posts or ruptures in the structure. The use of this drone helps us to avoid the fatigue and the dangers associated with crew searches, with the additional advantage that before going out to fix the fault the operators know what tools they will need to do the job.
Reaching new places
While the firefly drone was launched in early July in Villeta, the innovations do not end there. The plan now is to fly it over the fault zone with a light to illuminate the workers and minimize the problems caused by the reflectors currently used in these operations. And in the meantime we continue to expand our fleet: the Hercules drone, which we hope to launch at the end of 2019, will allow us to transport loads of up to 125 kilos in areas of difficult access, which will reduce the physical wear of the crews, and the badger drone, also in its development stage, which will allow us to clear the vegetation that looms over the cabling in a controlled and fast way, and without any contact with the network, thus ensuring that neither the circuits suffer damage when they come into contact with trees, causing a potential power cut, nor the trees suffer damage from pruning, as they are cut in a way that guarantees the their well-being.
