BGE Furthers Their Legacy of Innovation Using Measure Ground Control
Like many companies, BGE is continually looking for innovative ways to deliver better service to customers. Founded over 200 years ago as The Gas Light Company of Baltimore, BGE was the nation’s first gas provider, tasked with lighting the streets of the historic city—a feat they completed in 1890. Ever since then, BGE has stayed on the forefront of technology, always searching for new ways to deliver energy reliably and safely.
Today, BGE is Maryland’s largest electricity provider with more than 1.2 million residential electric customers. Though the company founders couldn’t have possibly imagined the use of drones to bring energy to customers, BGE saw an opportunity to extend their legacy of innovation even further.
Building a Formal Program
Like many organizations that are open to using innovative technology, BGE had experimented with drones for certain use cases, but never created a formal program. Anirudh “AP” Paduru, Key Manager of Smart Grid Innovation at BGE, recognized the need to implement a more holistic approach, starting with identifying problems and challenges that drones could potentially solve.
“We looked at every inspection that we do, from transmission and distribution to vegetation management—any use case where someone needs to gather visual data and decide what needs to be done,” says Paduru. “We quickly found many applications for drones across our organization. For example, during a transmission tower inspection, a technician might be looking through binoculars 300 feet into the air to make a decision. But what if they could use a drone to look closely at tower equipment and make a more informed decision?
“Other inspections require a worker to harness themselves and climb on something, which always poses a safety hazard. We realized that drones could eliminate such issues without jeopardizing safety measures. We started off with four or five applications like that to build the business case.”
Once Paduru received approval from leadership to build a formal program, he charted a roadmap of milestones and maturity levels that BGE needed to hit over the next three years. If they were able to achieve those benefits in the specified timeframe, they were on the right track and ready to invest more to get the next set of benefits.
One of the first questions that BGE leadership asked was, how would the team be structured? Early on, Paduru identified Andrew McCauley as a natural fit for leading the program, given his extensive experience in control room operations and procedures. “Andy jumped in right away, helping us build the program to where it is today,” Paduru relates.
Before leading BGE’s drone program, McCauley spent six years in Transmission Operation Support, helping to train and support the control room staff for bulk power operations. This involved writing procedures and providing training for transmission control operators—aspects of McCauley’s job that made him the perfect choice to build a drone department from the ground up.
