Dominion Energy Runs 50 Drones on America’s Grid

When Dominion Energy’s grid operators noticed an unexpected power drop at the Colonial Trail West solar farm in Surry County, Virginia this June, they didn’t send a lineman. They sent a drone.

Pilot Aaron Colgrove pulled up the mission from Dominion’s D-ROC, the company’s drone remote operations center, told the unit to head to the northwest corner of the 142-megawatt solar farm 50 miles (80 km) away, and let it run on its own.

The drone swept up and down 130 rows of solar panels, each between 300 and 500 feet (91-152 m) long, in a lawnmower-style pattern. Colgrove watched two screens: the color camera during approach, his human backstop for nearby traffic, then thermal imaging once the drone crossed onto the farm’s footprint.

Ten minutes later, he had his answer. A band of about a dozen bright white rectangles at the northern end of the third panel row, panels running too hot to generate electricity. He had the problem location. No walking crew needed.

That’s what a mature utility drone program looks like.

Dominion Stations 23 Drone-in-a-Box Units Across Its Grid

As The Virginian Pilot reported, Dominion’s Unmanned Systems Group operates 23 “drones in the box,” gray leg-mounted cabinets parked at substations and facilities across the company’s service territory. Each box is self-contained.

The drone charges its battery inside, receives weather and airspace checks automatically, and connects to pilots through onboard cellular telecommunications gear. That cellular link is the critical piece. The FAA allows Dominion to fly these units beyond visual line of sight, which means Colgrove can run a full solar farm sweep from a room that’s nowhere near Surry County.

Having the permission to fly Beyond Visual Line Of Sight with a dock for the drones is an advantage that will save time and resources for Dominion’s Unmanned Systems Group

The group has 10 FAA-certified pilots who’ve logged more than 5,000 flight hours across more than 10,000 miles of Dominion lines and facilities. Every pilot can operate any of the 50 platforms in the fleet. That fleet includes drones that fly, walk, crawl, and swim, selected by pilots based on battery life, payload capacity, speed, sensor options, and obstacle-avoidance capability for each specific job.

The Fleet Range Covers Every Inspection Type

The largest platform is a 6-foot-long (1.8 m) VTOL that looks like a fixed-wing aircraft and takes off and lands vertically. It cruises at 45 miles per hour (72 km/h) and can fly BVLOS, though Dominion limits that to lightly populated areas like the forests of western Virginia, where its transmission lines cross. At that speed, a single pilot can cover miles of high-voltage line in a fraction of the time a walking crew would need.

The VTOL doesn’t navigate by camera alone. It flies inside a point cloud, a 3D map built by onboard LIDAR lasers that continuously sweep for obstacles and track the power line’s exact position below. LIDAR measures precise wire-to-ground clearance distances and, critically, sees through vegetation to detect erosion affecting a pole or tower foundation. T.F. Butler, manager of the Unmanned Systems Group, put the capability gap plainly: “It’s the difference between what you can see at 200 feet versus 700 feet with a bad cellphone image.” That’s the gap between a lineman walking under a line and a sensor package with actual numbers.

For close-up inspection, pilots switch to a smaller black quadrotor designed to approach a structure, assess clearance, pause, and wait for manual input on the final approach. Pilot Joel Cashman can maneuver it over a pole top, take a shot from directly overhead, work around all four cardinal directions, then drop below equipment level. “You can count the threads on a bolt to see if it’s pulling out,” Butler said. “You can’t see that from the ground.”

The fleet also includes submersible drones for inspecting tower foundations under rivers and streams, and underwater cables. That will matter as Dominion builds out its offshore wind project, currently under construction 25 miles (40 km) into the Atlantic off the Virginia Beach coast. Odie, the group’s walking drone, covers post-storm damage assessment in terrain where downed trees and live fallen lines make it too dangerous for a human crew to walk in.

Thermal Imaging Turns Power Anomalies Into Solvable Problems

When Colgrove switched from color to thermal at the Colonial Trail West farm, he was looking for a specific signature. Panels running hotter than ambient temperature are panels that have stopped converting sunlight into electricity. Small white spots scattered across the field, individual overheating diodes, weren’t the issue. The solid band of bright white rectangles at the north end of the third row told him exactly where the generation loss was concentrated.

That diagnostic loop, grid operator notices anomaly, D-ROC queues the mission, pilot runs a thermal sweep, problem located, ran roughly ten minutes of active flight time. Walking an inspection of 130 panel rows, each up to 500 feet (152 m) long, would look nothing like that.

DroneXL’s Take

What Dominion has built is an in-house drone operations organization with a broader platform range than most commercial operators. Walking drones. Submersible drones. BVLOS-certified VTOL. Drone-in-a-box BVLOS across a multi-state grid. That’s not a supplemental inspection tool. That’s a parallel maintenance workforce with a different risk profile.

The piece that stands out after covering utility drone programs for years: the cellular BVLOS approval for those 23 box units. FAA BVLOS authorization is still a slow, case-by-case process for most commercial operators. Dominion’s box network is an operational realization that most programs are still piloting on a handful of units.

Other utilities will look at Dominion’s 23-box network and want the same thing. The piece nobody discusses: what does a program at this scale actually cost to build and sustain? Ten pilots, 50 platforms, FAA BVLOS authorization across a multi-state territory. That’s not a drone budget. That’s an aviation department.

The detail the article doesn’t address: what drone platforms are actually inside those 23 boxes? The manufacturer behind Dominion’s BVLOS fleet matters given the current regulatory environment around Chinese-manufactured drones operating over American critical infrastructure. That wasn’t disclosed. It should be.

Photo credit: Dominion Energy Virginia, Vanderbilt University