Luz del Sur Uses Drones to Clean Power Insulators

Luz del Sur now uses drones to clean insulators on its medium-voltage poles, cutting cleaning time by 40% to 60% in hard-to-reach areas, the company says. The effort began last year, when the project also won the company the Creatividad Empresarial award in the "Process Innovation" category.

Insulators sit on electrical poles and keep them from touching power cables. Their job sounds simple, but metropolitan Lima’s pollution and lack of rain mean they don’t stay clean for long. Alfredo Melly, Luz del Sur's deputy corporate relations manager, said mud builds up on them. Left alone, the grime can trigger a ground discharge and set off a protection system. That safety mechanism stops electricity from leaking, but it also takes the entire circuit offline. Thousands of customers lose power when that happens.

"This climatic condition that exists in Lima makes it necessary for us to remove the mud that forms on those insulators with some frequency," Melly said.

The Old Way Was Slower and Dirtier

For years, workers had to shut off the section they were servicing. They rode a special truck’s hydraulic arm to the top of a pole, then washed the equipment with demineralised water. The method couldn’t reach every hard-to-reach spot, while the truck’s running engine added pollution to the job. Crews worked in a tight space. The truck itself was part of the problem.

The drone changes that calculation. It carries a hose connected to a tank and sprays pressurised water onto the insulators. Luz del Sur says the approach is safer for workers and kinder to the environment. The company ran a pilot before moving to full deployment, and this year it began adding the project to daily work shifts. Crews prioritise areas trucks can’t reach. Melly said the company is still collecting operational data and believes two or three drones could handle the capital’s medium-voltage poles.

Scale, Priorities and Monitoring

Luz del Sur doesn’t clean every pole every day. Instead, it ranks sites across its concession area as most critical, moderately critical, less critical or inaccessible. The most polluted zones would need washing twice a year, Melly said. The company manages 40,000 medium-voltage structures, including poles and aerial substations, and its coverage extends to Cañete and Huarochirí. That’s a lot of infrastructure, and this work depends on careful planning rather than a response only after an outage.

The drones serve another purpose, too. Luz del Sur uses them to monitor electrical installations and the ground around transmission substations. "We have deployed 6 drones in the areas where we estimate there could be a problem with the El Niño phenomenon so that every so often they can be activated, rise up and detect early any landslide that could occur when the rains begin," Melly said. The company is also testing a flexible robotic drone designed to remove objects stuck to electrical installations.

Why This Matters:

Reliable power isn’t a luxury for families and businesses that depend on it. An outage caused by dirty insulators hits hardest among people with the least room to absorb it. When a protection system trips across an entire circuit, thousands of customers go dark at once. A utility that finds safer, faster ways to prevent those failures does work that protects the public, and that’s worth attention. The drone program also raises questions beyond one company: how workers are protected, how environmental impacts are measured, and whether gains reported in a pilot hold up across a whole concession area. Public regulators and communities should ask those questions as new technology moves from the pilot stage into everyday service.