In 2025 AEP Ohio piloted drone inspections on four percent of its entire distribution system, work it would typically do on the ground with inspectors, and found 150-plus tier-one issues, the majority of them thermal anomalies found with the drone and its thermal sensor. Jake Reed, who manages the drone program for AEP Ohio, described the pilot in the January 2026 Skydio webinar "Flight to Insight". Reed said AEP estimates that it has avoided well over thirty million customer minutes of interruption over the past couple of years from findings like these. It calculates the estimate from customer minutes of interruption by isolation device and historical numbers for what that equipment would have caused.
Reed said: "So the majority of these tier one issues were not causing an outage." Examples he showed included hot jumpers at right around two hundred fifty degrees, and a pole that crews saw on the livestream looking wrong; once replaced and cut open, it looked like a cigar because it was burning from the inside out.
AEP Ohio serves 1.5 million customers across ten thousand square miles and 47,000 distribution line miles, and Reed framed the work around the some thousands of power interruptions the utility saw between October 2023 and October 2024. Historically its inspections would just get pictures of issues. The drones instead captured one or more pictures of every asset depending on the shot sheet, leaving between four and five hundred thousand images that a single person spent five hundred plus hours going over during the year. Reed said that is what started the effort to get some sort of AI image analysis, so AEP could spend more time flying drones and less time going through every single image.
For 2026, leadership liked the benefit of the pilot, and AEP Ohio is taking on all of its overhead inspections by drone, and a little more, so that it can line its inspection program up with its vegetation program. It also plans to use docks, mainly the mobile one it has now, moving them strategically to fly drones remotely instead of having boots on the ground. Reed said AEP is looking to some sort of Levatas integration for that, since extrapolating four to five hundred thousand images is not sustainable for one person.
On systems, Reed said AEP Ohio has in-house dashboards and an outage management system, and is an Esri shop for mapping. AEP Ohio is also working with Skydio on asset based inspection, which launched the previous September and uses existing asset data to plan missions and update asset registries; Reed said it has been great with a little bit of tweaking of AEP's asset location data. The webinar's live remote flight and Levatas AI results review used a notional company called Clearview Power, not AEP Ohio.
Details