Energy & utilities
with the details that matter.
Power plants, substations, water, wastewater, and CHP. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Generation and distribution assets mix dense interior plant with energized outdoor yards. Combining terrestrial scanning with drone mapping keeps crews out of the yard while still producing measurable geometry.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Plant buildings
- Switchyards
- Utility roofs
- Pump stations
- Water assets
- Access rules
Capturing generation and utility plant
A generating station or utility plant is really two capture problems joined by one control network: a dense, congested interior where a tripod belongs, and an energized outdoor yard where it does not. Getting both into the same coordinate system is most of the value.
Control across the whole site
Before anything else, a control network that spans the powerhouse, the yard, and the connecting corridors. Without it the turbine hall and the switchyard become two unrelated datasets, and every tie-in between them has to be re-measured later.
Turbine hall and boiler house
Machine floor, operating deck, condenser bay, feedwater and boiler feed pumps, and the steel above them. Multi-level plant needs setups on every deck plus the grating between them, because the vertical relationships are what a replacement package has to fit through.
Balance-of-plant and support rooms
Water treatment, air compressors, MCCs, control rooms, cable spreading areas, and the pipe and tray corridors that connect them. These are usually where a project runs out of room long before the main equipment does.
Yards and outdoor equipment
Transformer pads, firewalls, cooling towers, fuel and chemical storage, stacks, and access roads. Aerial mapping covers the ground plane and anything at height; terrestrial setups fill in at the fence line where the detail has to be dense.
Rigging and laydown routes
How the new rotor, transformer, or heat exchanger reaches its foundation: gate widths, road grades, bridge and culvert crossings, overhead line clearances, and the laydown area itself. This is a site-scale question that aerial data answers well.
Outage windows, escorts, and energized plant
Utility sites run on permits. Site-specific safety training, badging lead time, escort availability, and arc-flash boundary rules usually govern the schedule more than the size of the building does. We plan escorted routes in advance so a crew is never standing idle waiting for someone to open a door, and we treat energized equipment boundaries as hard limits on where a tripod goes.
The highest-value capture on a generating asset is normally taken before the outage rather than during it. With the unit still running, tie-in geometry can be measured, fabrication started, scaffolding designed, and rigging paths checked, so the critical path during the outage becomes installation instead of discovery. Where geometry is genuinely only visible with the unit down — inside a boiler, a condenser waterbox, or an energized enclosure — that scope gets scheduled into the outage explicitly and scoped as its own short, intense window.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
Deliverables for outage and capital work
Utility projects tend to need engineering-grade geometry in a few dense places and site-scale context everywhere else, so the deliverable set is usually mixed rather than uniform.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Equipment replacement in the powerhouse | Dense point cloud plus modeled interference zone | Rigging, clearance, and tie-in checks need solids around the equipment and measurable cloud everywhere else. |
| Outage scope definition | Registered point cloud with a coverage report | Planners want to walk the unit remotely and take dimensions themselves rather than wait for a model. |
| Site expansion, interconnection, or BESS addition | Orthomosaic, surface model, and contours | Civil design starts from current ground, drainage, and access, not from a decade-old site survey. |
| Long-term plant documentation | Point cloud plus as-built drawings and model where scoped | A maintained record shortens every future outage, because only what changed has to be recaptured. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
What goes wrong on utility sites
- Two datasets, two coordinate systems — Scanning the powerhouse on a local grid and flying the yard on a separate control network produces data that cannot be combined without a re-survey. Deciding the site coordinate system before mobilization costs nothing; fixing it afterwards costs a return trip.
- Missing the vertical — Multi-level plant photographs and scans badly from a single deck. Grating, handrail, and pipe crossing between levels hide geometry that a design team will absolutely need, so setups have to be planned per elevation rather than per footprint.
- Insulated pipe measured as pipe — A scanner records the outside of the lagging, not the line inside it. On steam and feedwater systems that difference is significant, and any model built from the cloud needs the insulation thickness stated rather than silently assumed.
- Yard access assumed rather than confirmed — Minimum approach distances, switching schedules, and escort rules decide where a crew can physically stand in an energized yard. Confirming those before the date is set is the difference between a productive day and a wasted mobilization.
What plant and outage planners ask
Can you scan while the unit is online?
Yes, and it is usually the better plan. Capturing a running unit lets tie-in points, clearances, and rigging routes be settled before the outage starts, so the shutdown is spent installing rather than measuring. Areas that are genuinely inaccessible while energized get scheduled into the outage as a separate, tightly planned window.
How do you handle the switchyard safely?
By staying out of it where we can. Aerial capture covers yard equipment, bus geometry, and structures from a planned standoff, and terrestrial setups are placed outside approach boundaries. Anything inside those boundaries happens only with your switching authority, your escort, and your rules governing the plan.
Will the data work for our engineering contractor?
That depends on which software they open and what tolerance they design to, which is why we ask before capture rather than after. Registered clouds go out in the exchange format their tools read, and a registration and QA report goes with them so their engineers can judge whether the data supports the tolerance they need.
Can you document a plant before decommissioning?
That is one of the strongest cases for a thorough single capture, because the asset stops existing afterwards. A complete registered cloud with documented coverage becomes the permanent record for demolition planning, material inventory, environmental documentation, and anything that has to be answered years later.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote