How Xcel Did Nearly 60,000 Drone Inspections With One Pilot

Two linemen, four drones, and one remote pilot completed almost 60,000 electric distribution inspections in Texas in the first part of 2026. Those inspections produced more than 8,000 work orders. On episode 007 of Tap Into Data, Jared Westrem and Adam Chartrand talk with Zachary Roach, Director of Remote Sensing at Xcel Energy, about how the utility got there and what it's still working on.

From combat controller to utility drones

Zach started flying drones as an Air Force combat controller. On a 2016 deployment to Northwest Africa, he flew DJI Phantom 4s to survey dirt landing strips for C-17s and C-130s. After that, he worked as a contractor on PG&E's wildfire safety inspection program in 2018, then joined Xcel as a pilot.

The military gave him a habit he still uses. He sorts every problem into the strategic, operational, or tactical level before deciding what data to collect or what to automate. He also points to commercial aviation as the model to follow. A modern airliner can nearly fly itself, but there are still two pilots in the cockpit. Automation should take work off people so they can concentrate on decisions and safety.

Stop trying to turn everyone into a pilot

Xcel's original program used a hub-and-spoke model. It trained people across the business to fly as a side duty, and more than 80 business-unit pilots went through the training. Most of them flew only a handful of times a year, which made it hard to stay proficient or produce reliable data. Zach says the technology was "massively underutilized."

So Xcel changed the job. People in the field became what the FAA calls flight coordinators. A lineman drives a truck with a dock in the back to the job site, the drone flies the mission, and a centralized remote pilot operations center handles the safety of the flight. Zach is a strong supporter of the FAA's proposed Part 108 rules for this reason.

The fixed DJI Dock 2 works well at Xcel's solar sites, where 33 units are deployed across the first eight sites and connected over Starlink. But the Dock 2 is built to stay in one spot. The Dock 3 can be mounted on a vehicle and moved, and it supports one-tap calibration. Jared says one-tap calibration with RTK was one of the changes that made the mobile setup practical.

The Texas numbers

In Xcel's Texas service area, the work is overhead pole assessments and line design in high wildfire-risk areas. Each of the two linemen's trucks carries two Dock 3s on Starlink. One remote pilot flies all four drones at once, Monday through Thursday.

The scope kept growing as the results came in. The first target was 8,000 inspections by the end of last year, and the team finished it in two or three weeks. The 2026 target then went to 100,000, and later to roughly 148,000 when another lineman and two more docks were added. Xcel's flight approvals also grew, from a beyond-visual-line-of-sight waiver to a one-to-many amendment, and the team now runs 4-to-1 on distribution.

Zach says automation has cut distribution inspection costs by about 5x. In his view, "the question that everybody in distribution should be asking themselves is... what do we do with all this extra money? And the answer is you go do more inspections."

The imagery has another benefit. Each inspection is a dated visual record of the asset, which holds up much better than a signature on a visual check if there's ever an ignition investigation.

Automation is only as good as your asset records

A drone can only fly to a pole automatically if the database has the pole in the right place, and often it doesn't. Zach describes several projects to fix this. Xcel is correcting asset locations against satellite imagery and parcel maps. It is building a LiDAR-based digital twin of distribution rights-of-way, with the point clouds classified to pull out components. Every drone inspection also captures an RTK-corrected location. The utility is also working to move off its Smallworld GIS toward Esri's ArcGIS Enterprise.

Adam remembers how this used to work. Storm patrol notes went on sticky notes on the truck dashboard and sometimes ended up in the garbage at the command center. Then crews had to go back out and find the same location again. Zach would like to see something like ATAK, the military's shared mapping app, used in utility storm response: one shared view for linemen, the control center, and executives.

What's still hard, and what's next

Connectivity is the biggest limit right now. Substations on Xcel's system average 35 to 36 miles apart, and the Rocky Mountains can break the link to the drone. Zach wants DJI to approve a third-party LTE dongle. Until then, his team is looking at using a second docked drone as a relay.

He's open to other hardware, including long-endurance aircraft for transmission work. His position is that when you're flying moving docks from thousands of miles away, "you've got to be able to trust your hardware." He also says a reseller that knows what works in the field, not just in theory, has been a key partner.

The numbers so far are strong. The program usually logged 300 to 330 missions a year. By May 15, it had passed 305, already more than in all of 2024, without adding pilots. Zach expects that within five years, 10 to 15 people will manage thousands of automated flights across all eight of Xcel's states. In his words, they'll be "more like air traffic controllers than drone operators."

Adam's takeaway for Canadian utilities is that recent beyond-visual-line-of-sight rule changes could make this model possible north of the border.

Press play to hear the full conversation with Zach, including war stories from both sides of the vegetation line.

Key takeaways

• Two linemen, four truck-mounted DJI Dock 3s and one remote pilot completed almost 60,000 distribution inspections and created more than 8,000 work orders.
• Xcel got more out of its drones by turning field staff into flight coordinators and moving flight safety to a central remote pilot operations center, instead of training more occasional pilots.
• Automation cut distribution inspection costs by about 5x, and Zach's advice is to put the savings into inspecting more of the system.
• Automated missions depend on accurate asset locations, so GIS cleanup, LiDAR digital twins, and RTK-corrected drone data come before scaling.
• Connectivity in mountain terrain is still the main limit, and the team is waiting on LTE options or drone-to-drone relays.