Turning a sceptical DSO into 3 times recurring client

Enabling Imatra to control and manage potential risks more effectively than ever before

Background

Imatra Elekter is a DSO client with more than 25,600 private and business customers.

3091 km 0.4 kV – 35 kV electricity network
1322 substations
the annual sales volume is about 227 GWh

Imatra’s main issue was the lack of information regarding the span and condition of the 10kV OH lines, long and expensive inspections and no digital data regarding the found line faults.

Hepta

The success story of Hepta has become known due to a mix of unique skill-set and experience in the team:

15+ years of experience in on-ground grid inspection
7+ years of experience in helicopter grid inspection
8+ years of experience in drone grid inspection
Including data scientists working with satellite data, software engineers deploying machine learning models, aerospace engineers having previously built manned helicopters

With Hepta's solution, your engineers have overview and access to the current state of the assets at their fingertips

Mapping the main issues

Hepta met with Imatra’s key engineers and mapped out their main issues:

Hard to access area inspection (bogs, dense forests)
Fault documentation was not integrated with the line data nor with location data
Faults that are difficult to detect from the ground (insulator damage/wear)
Loss of effectivity and income due to prolonged on-foot inspection times
Thermal damages to the insulators

Additionally rose a question regarding the employees who were currently doing the on-foot inspection. What would happen to them? Will they be fired?

No, with Hepta’s solution you can bring your engineers working on the field into the safety of an office and seat them behind the screens where they have a constant overview and access to the current situation of the assets.

What has been done?

From 2018 to 2020 Hepta has:

Digitized almost one third of the MV overhead lines (900 linear kilometers)
Lowered inspection costs by 40% (compared to on-foot inspection)
Raised the fault finding quality by 30%
Provided secure cloud access to tower data and fault reports
Reduced risk to technicians by using drones for data capture
Full customer support by the Hepta team
Instant reporting of danger areas during the flights (fallen trees, broken power lines, tilting masts)
Integrated LiDAR, thermal and RGB data to Hepta Insights software

Feedback of the client

Imatra’s feedback has been more than positive. The digital data assists the engineers to streamline their inspection and maintenance procedures. Three photos of each mast provide an excellent overview of the line condition. Not to mention, data captured from above is significantly more accurate than land-based photography.

Annotations make it possible to locate and manage existing faults and export defect data in .csv or .pdf format.

Found faults are labelled, geotagged and colour-coded depending on their severity and presented in the secure Hepta Insights interface. The inspection data is more accurate and up to date than ever before.

In the long term, Imatra will have a 100% digitized network overview enabling them to control and manage potential risks more effectively than ever before.