Inspection Drones, Grid Robots, and the New Maintenance Stack

Rene Grywnow’s 5-Minute Business Punch · Oct 1, 2026 · 4m

Part I stayed inside the factory fence. Part II walks out the gate, onto hundreds of kilometres of transmission line, substation fencing and pipeline that was never a “plant,” and is simply too much infrastructure for too few people to walk.

SP Energy Networks’ Project VOLT runs drone-in-a-box units at four substations across the Lake District and Cumbria, flown beyond visual line of sight from a Remote Operations Centre 200+ miles away in Buckinghamshire. But the drone isn’t the point: a camera drone still needs someone to review every image, which just moves the bottleneck from walking the…