Frontier News | DJI Drones Applied in Desert New Energy Bases: Operational and Maintenance Efficiency of Ultra-large-scale Power Stations Increased by 26 Times

Text | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

Recently, DJI's enterprise solutions held a sharing event in the Kubuqi Desert, focusing on the practical applications of drone technology in the construction and operation and maintenance of new energy bases. As the world's first new energy project with a capacity of tens of millions of kilowatts, the scale of its construction and operation and maintenance has brought new challenges that traditional technologies struggle to handle.

At the site of the Ordos New Energy Base in the middle - northern part of the Kubuqi Desert in Inner Mongolia, large - scale photovoltaic panel arrays stretch across the sand dunes. In order to balance ecological restoration and power generation efficiency, the height of the photovoltaic panels in the project is raised to 1.5 meters or more, higher than the 0.8 - 1 meter of general projects, which increases the difficulty of on - site maintenance and inspection.

Taking a 1 - million - kilowatt photovoltaic power station for desert control as an example, it covers an area of about 32,000 mu and contains more than 2 million key devices. The station area is vast and the internal roads are complex. If traditional manual inspection is used, it takes 180 days to complete a comprehensive inspection. In addition, traditional manual inspection can only visually judge the visible damage or cleanliness of the component surface, and it is difficult to effectively detect potential safety hazards such as hot spots and bypass diode failures.

Song Tianqi, the person - in - charge of DJI's enterprise solutions in the energy industry, pointed out that DJI promotes the intelligentization of photovoltaic inspection through technological upgrades. Centering around the three cores of "safety, intelligence, and reliability", it ensures that drones can operate efficiently in complex environments and realize the digitalization of power station operation and maintenance.

The intelligent drone inspection system effectively solves the inspection problems of ultra - large - scale stations and complex terrains through high - altitude operations, bringing an actual improvement in efficiency.

Liu Chang from the Science and Technology Innovation and Digitalization Department of Three Gorges Inner Mongolia Energy shared the application data of drones in the pilot photovoltaic - energy storage power station: "Under the traditional manual inspection mode, 4 people in 2 groups can inspect about 1,000 photovoltaic modules per day at most. Now, with the autonomous drone inspection, about 30,000 photovoltaic modules are inspected on average per day, and it takes 36 days to complete the inspection of the whole station. The efficiency is more than 26 times higher than that of manual inspection."

36Kr learned that the fault recognition accuracy of the drone system reaches over 95%.

Yu Yangyang, a representative of DJI's enterprise solutions in the energy business, explained that the drones are equipped with dual - mode payloads of high - definition visible light and infrared thermal imaging. Once the operating temperature of the photovoltaic modules exceeds the normal range, it may indicate functional overload or bypass diode damage. Drones can capture the color temperature differences in the high - altitude through infrared thermal imaging cameras and intuitively identify abnormalities such as hot spots. Drone inspection is not restricted by terrain, can comprehensively and quickly detect photovoltaic panels, and already has the ability to conduct daily inspections of equipment such as collector lines and step - up stations.

In the on - site demonstration session, DJI demonstrated products such as DJI Dock 3 and drones like Matrice 4TD and Matrice 4T. Staff can remotely issue tasks by logging in to the control platform. The drones take off on their own, complete image collection, fault recognition under the guidance of the intelligent control platform, automatically return after the inspection, and generate reports.

Pan Yu from Inner Mongolia Huaneng Kubuqi Energy Co., Ltd. also shared the application of drones in the construction stage: On a site covering more than 60,000 mu, the drone photogrammetry technology completed the topographic survey in just two weeks, with an efficiency nearly 9 times higher than that of the traditional manual method. After the project was put into operation, the company introduced a fully automated drone airport inspection solution for its large - scale facilities.

Statistics from the Wind Energy Professional Committee of the Chinese Renewable Energy Society show that the number of large - scale accidents such as tower collapses, fire burn - outs, and key component failures in the Chinese wind power industry has been on the rise in the past three years. Among them, blade problems are particularly prominent, accounting for up to 44%. Traditional manual inspection mainly uses high - altitude hanging baskets and ground telescopes for observation, which not only poses safety risks but also has low detection efficiency. It often takes 1 - 2 working days to manually inspect a single wind turbine, and the error in manually recording data is relatively large.

Yu Yangyang introduced that currently, DJI's drone airports have been applied in more than 1,000 new energy power stations, and the coverage rate of drone inspection solutions in domestic new energy stations has reached 50%. Drones also show advantages in wind power inspection. Based on DJI's drone airports and equipment such as the M400, some wind farms have independently developed wind turbine inspection systems. Drones can complete the inspection of the blades of a single wind turbine in 15 minutes, automatically identify 14 types of defects such as blade cracks and fractures, with an identification accuracy of over 95%.

In the Kubuqi Desert, the shading effect of photovoltaic panels reduces the surface temperature and water evaporation, providing a suitable environment for the growth of vegetation under the panels, forming a circular model of "photovoltaic power generation + forage grass planting + animal husbandry".

Yu Yangyang said that the quantitative data provided by continuous drone observations provides data support for photovoltaic desert control work. These data help evaluate the effectiveness of desert control, optimize vegetation configuration, and adjust governance strategies, and support the operation and maintenance and research teams in conducting long - term observations and quantitative evaluations of local sand dune activities, vegetation restoration, and the operating status of photovoltaic facilities.