Power transmission & distribution
with the details that matter.
Substations, switchyards, duct banks, and transmission structures. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Substations and switchyards are the clearest case for combining aerial and terrestrial capture: the yard is energised and nobody should be walking it with a tripod, while control houses and cable trenches need dense interior data. Clearance verification and equipment replacement planning are the usual drivers.
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- Substations
- Switchyards
- Duct banks
- Transmission structures
- Control houses
- Clearance studies
Capturing substations, switchyards, and line corridors
Grid assets are the clearest case in our work for keeping people at a distance and letting instruments do the reaching. The order below is built around the approach boundary: everything outside it is captured conventionally, everything inside it is captured from as far away as the geometry allows.
Control house and relay building
Panel lineups, cable entries, battery and charger rooms, HVAC, and the trench or floor penetrations under the panels. This is ordinary indoor capture in an extraordinary setting, and it is where equipment replacement projects normally start.
Yard from the air
Bus geometry, structures, switches, insulator strings, and equipment positions captured on a planned flight rather than by walking a tripod between energized bays. Aerial capture is the safety argument and the coverage argument at the same time.
Grade-level civil work
Cable trenches, duct bank stub-ups, foundations, oil containment, fence lines, and access roads. What is visible above grade gets measured; anything buried stays a locating contractor's job, and their markouts can be tied into the same control network.
Transformer bays and firewalls
Pad dimensions, bushing positions, radiator envelopes, firewall geometry, and the clearance around a unit that a replacement has to be moved into. Transformer swaps are rigging exercises, and rigging is decided by the tightest dimension on the route.
Structures and the line corridor
Transmission and distribution structures, arm geometry, attachment points, and conductor position along the span, with the corridor and its access captured from the air. Conductor geometry is a snapshot, so the conditions on the day belong in the record.
Approach boundaries, switching, and escorts
Nothing happens in an energized yard without your rules leading. Minimum approach distances, the switching status of each bay, escort by a qualified person, and any restriction on flying over the site are all settled before a date is confirmed, and they determine where equipment can physically be placed. We treat these as hard limits: where a boundary means a sector cannot be captured well, that is stated in the coverage note rather than solved by moving closer.
Utilities also tend to impose their own rules on what happens to the data. Sites subject to critical infrastructure protection requirements commonly carry contractual conditions on where imagery and point clouds may be stored, who may access them, and how they are transmitted, and those conditions belong in the scope from the beginning rather than being negotiated after a capture exists. Scheduling around a planned outage helps in a different way: with a bay de-energized, terrestrial setups can go where they otherwise never could.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
What grid projects actually use the data for
Substation and line work splits into two very different deliverable families: dense geometry inside a fence for equipment work, and corridor-scale geometry outside it for clearance and access studies.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Equipment replacement or bay addition | Point cloud plus modeled bay and structures | Fit, rigging path, and connection geometry all need solids in the immediate area of the work. |
| Clearance and access studies | Registered cloud with measured clearance sections | Engineers evaluate clearances themselves against their own criteria; what they need is trustworthy geometry and stated conditions. |
| Control house modification | As-built drawings and a model of the building | Panel additions and cable routing inside a finished building are an ordinary coordination problem with an unusual setting. |
| Corridor and right-of-way documentation | Aerial mapping, surface model, and orthomosaic | Access roads, encroachment, vegetation extent, and structure positions are site-scale rather than component-scale questions. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
What goes wrong on grid assets
- Planning a yard capture like a building — A scope that assumes a crew can walk between bays with a tripod does not survive contact with the site's switching and approach rules. Aerial capture and standoff setups have to be in the plan from the start, not substituted in on the day.
- Treating conductor position as fixed — Conductor sag changes with temperature and loading, so a captured position describes one moment. Any clearance conclusion drawn from it has to carry the ambient conditions and loading state of that moment, or it is being read as something it is not.
- Expecting the buried grid — Ground grids, buried duct, and cable runs are not visible to any surface instrument. That is subsurface locating work, which we do not perform — but a locating contractor's markouts can be surveyed into the same coordinate system so everything ends up in one model.
- No agreement on data handling — Discovering a restriction on storage or transmission after the data exists is the most avoidable problem on these projects. Where the site carries handling requirements, they are cheapest to accommodate before the first file is created.
Questions from substation and line engineers
Can you capture an energized substation?
Yes, working outside approach boundaries and using aerial capture for the yard itself. The plan is built around your switching status and escort rules, and where a boundary keeps us far enough away that a sector is thin, we say so rather than presenting partial data as complete. A planned outage on a bay is always the better opportunity if one is coming.
Do you fly drones over substations?
Only with the site's approval and the required airspace authorization, both arranged in advance. Many utilities have their own internal approval process for aerial work over their assets, which typically takes longer than the flight planning does, so it is worth starting that conversation early.
Can you produce conductor clearance measurements?
We can produce the geometry — conductor position along the span, structure attachment points, and ground surface beneath — captured at a recorded time under recorded conditions. Evaluating that against a clearance criterion is an engineering judgement that belongs with your line engineer, because it depends on assumptions about temperature and loading that a capture cannot supply.
How do you handle CIP or security requirements?
By putting them in the scope. Where a site carries handling conditions on imagery and point cloud data, those conditions shape how files are stored, transferred, and accessed for the life of the project, and they are far easier to build in from the start than to retrofit once a dataset exists.
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