Utilities Bringing Drone Operations In-House
Director of UAS Operations at NV5 on navigating the DJI ban to build a compliant drone fleet
The biggest shift is that drone work is starting to look less like a specialist field service and more like an internal software enabled operations function. Utilities outsourced because flight demand was spiky, pilots were hard to train, and early internal programs crashed aircraft. As autonomy improves, docks keep drones on site, and AI cuts review labor, the main reasons to hire outside crews get weaker for routine inspections.
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Today, large utilities still spread work across multiple contractors, often with $1M plus annual contracts, because they need surge capacity for seasonal and regulatory inspection programs. NV5 described utilities using several vendors at once rather than staffing for 100 crews they would not keep busy year round.
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The first work to move inside is the repeatable work, not the hardest work. NV5 says substation inspections are already a better fit for drone in a box because safer hardware and autonomy reduce crash risk. Skydio and Percepto now sell docked systems built for persistent on site inspections of substations, solar fields, and industrial facilities.
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In housing does not mean buying commodity drones and flying them manually. It pushes buyers toward integrated stacks, where the drone, dock, controller, connectivity, and software are designed together. That is why U.S. vendors like Skyfish and Skydio emphasize full stack control, and why utilities that internalize flights will likely standardize on a small set of compliant platforms.
The market is heading toward a split. Routine, high frequency inspection work will increasingly sit inside large asset owners, while contractors remain important for bursty projects, storm response, large corridor scans, and jobs needing specialized sensors or crews. That makes the next battleground less about selling one more flight, and more about owning the operating system for an internal drone fleet.