Luz del Sur Drones Cut Outage Risk, Boost Efficiency

Luz del Sur now sends drones up its poles to wash electrical insulators. In hard-to-reach areas, the company says, cleaning efficiency has risen between 40% and 60%. The project began last year, and the company won the Creatividad Empresarial award in the “Process Innovation” category that same year.

Insulators sit atop electrical poles, keeping the pole from touching the power cable. Alfredo Melly, Luz del Sur’s deputy corporate relations manager, said mud is the problem in metropolitan Lima. Urban pollution and a long stretch without rain coat the insulators, and the grime doesn’t wash away on its own.

The Old Way and Its Costs

As dirt builds up, it can cause a ground discharge and trip a protection system. The safeguard prevents electricity from leaking, but it also takes the entire electrical circuit offline. Thousands of customers lose power because of one dirty insulator.

For years, crews cleaned the equipment at considerable expense. First, they shut down the section under service. Later, the company used a special truck with a hydraulic arm to lift a worker to the top of a pole, where the worker scrubbed the equipment with demineralised water. Melly said crews couldn’t reach the hardest-to-access spots, and the truck’s idling engine added pollution.

How the Drone Works

The drone 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 gentler on the environment. After running a pilot, the company rolled out the project this year across daily work shifts, prioritising areas trucks can’t reach.

The company isn’t washing every pole daily. That’s deliberate. It has sorted its concession area by need, classifying sites as most critical, moderately critical, less critical or inaccessible. In the dirtiest zones, Melly said, each structure would need cleaning twice a year. Luz del Sur oversees 40,000 medium-voltage structures, including poles and aerial substations, across an area that extends into Cañete and Huarochirí.

Melly said the company is still collecting operational data. He believes two or three drones could clean medium-voltage poles across the capital. That’s a small fleet for work that once called for a truck, a crew and a shutdown.

Monitoring Beyond the Poles

The drones also monitor the system. Luz del Sur has sent six drones to areas where it sees possible trouble linked to the El Niño phenomenon. “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 pull objects caught on electrical installations. That pilot remains in its early stages.

Why This Matters: For a private utility, the economics are straightforward. Avoiding a shutdown avoids a cost, and keeping a customer powered protects revenue. Luz del Sur’s move from truck-and-crew cleaning to aerial maintenance shows what private operators can do when they’re free to choose their tools and answer for the results. The company points to safety and environmental impact, and those gains matter. Still, the 40% to 60% efficiency figure comes from the company, and Melly’s operational data hasn’t yet been published in full. Investors and regulators will want to see it before treating the savings as settled. The broader lesson concerns responsibility: a utility that maintains its own infrastructure with better technology, rather than waiting for failures to force a response, is doing precisely what a well-run enterprise should do.