Hydropower is one of the most sustainable energy sources contributing nearly 30% of global renewable energy generation, providing clean, renewable electricity to millions around the world. The hydroelectric facilities that are home to the hydro operations rely on massive infrastructure—such as spillways, turbines, dams, and penstock, requiring precision and accuracy in their operations, maintenance and inspections.
If you are working in the hydro power facility, then you would be familiar with the challenges that come along in the maintenance and inspections of these giant structures. Between numerous operational, financial, and safety issues, it’s a lot to manage, requiring you to continually meet increasing environmental regulations, managing aging infrastructure, and assessing what issues are most critical to keep the facility running smoothly—and profitably.
And while focusing on the top most priority, when it comes to inspections and maintenance, there are certain critical systems—like penstocks—that need to be overlooked as they play a foundational role in your operation’s reliability and performance.
Here in this article, we’ll look at why penstock inspections and maintenance matter more than ever—and how implementing advanced tools like Augmented Reality (AR) Remote Visual Assistance in your maintenance and inspection workflows can dramatically improve efficiency, enhance safety, reduce downtime, and lower overall operational costs, helping you to tackle the challenges with greater precision, safety, and efficiency.
Penstocks are the large pipes or conduits made up of steel that carry water from the reservoir to the turbines. Maintaining these channels of water is essential for ensuring uninterrupted energy production, protecting environmental resources, and guaranteeing public safety.
Penstock inspections are pretty challenging as these large pipelines are sharply sloped or even totally vertical, mostly built on the hillsides in remote terrain or parallel to dams. These inspections need careful planning and are very hard to execute due to their technical complexity and logistical challenges, including weather conditions, high-altitude access, dark unreachable areas of the penstocks’ interiors, which demands need for specialized equipment’ personnel and toolset.
Inspection teams heavily rely on professional climbers with ropes and harnesses to get to hard-to-reach places. They had to depressurize and drain penstock, resulting in a temporary halt to power generation due to the time intensive process. In some cases, coordination with third-party inspection agencies is required, further complicating scheduling and execution.
For interior inspection, the inspector had to walk through the penstock for visual checks with flashlights or borescopes, and record the data manually. And when the problem is more complex and needs expert intervention, skilled experts are sent to remote locations, incurring travel and accommodation costs and downtime.
However, in most advanced settings some hydro power plant facilities deploy drone technology or robotic crawlers, ultrasonic sensors and 3D laser scanning for inspecting the interior and exterior of penstocks. But even then, it still requires significant preparation and onsite expertise to interpret findings, often under unsafe or time-sensitive conditions.
All these scenarios not only expose personnel to hazardous conditions or confined slippery space but also takes a lot more time and results in extended downtimes, often yielding inconsistent results.
The hydro industry has begun to modernize its operations and maintenance with IoT monitoring, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and predictive maintenance algorithms. Even with these tech approaches and techniques like laser scanning, drone, and ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) inspections, expertise guidance is still required to visually inspect equipment & help on-site personnels to guide and operate these advanced tools. And here, AR Remote Visual Assistance steps in.
Think about this: Instead of having to shut down operations for an entire day and bring in your top inspector, your technician can now do the inspection themselves using an AR headset or mobile device. With AR Genie Remote Assist, on-site technician or personnel can connect with a remote expert inspector in real-time, allowing experts to see everything the technician sees to give step-by-step guidance.
Experts can even mark areas of concern directly on the screen using AR Annotations or markers during live video streaming and provide live documents to refer to during the inspection. Now, you can have expert support instantly available from anywhere, without the need for lengthy shutdowns or travel.
Let's consider a use case scenario. A mid-sized hydroelectric facility in a remote location scheduled an emergency outer surface inspection of its 250-meter-long above the ground steel penstock. The seasonal expansion and recent temperature fluctuations had caused some visible signs of corrosion on its outer surface and a minor leakage near a flange joint.
Conventionally, this kind of inspection would require a rope access expert inspector to be on-site for inspection. But in this case, the senior inspector was not available there, being 2000 km away in a distant city, which would result in extended downtime and delay. In such a situation, the facility sent a local technician to visually inspect the case. But now the question is how the local technician can inspect and give correct findings when he is not much aware about the context?
The company deployed AR Genie Remote Assist instead as a remote support and collaboration tool to visually connect the local technician with the senior inspector miles away, transforming their inspection process.
Here’s what happened:
In cases where experts need to collaborate with their teams during technical video conferencing in the remote session, they can use the “Whiteboarding” feature in real time during the live video feed. Using this feature, participants can engage in visual brainstorming and collaboration by sharing a digital whiteboard within the remote session platform, allowing them to draw, text, annotate, or place graphics for interactive discussions, clear communication and idea generation.
The outcome?
Zero travel, 70 percent quicker inspection, 50 percent less expensive than ever before, and real time AR data storage.
The expert was able to easily and instantly annotate on the live video feed, paused and zoomed on specific patterns of corrosion or weld joints, and captured evidence as screenshots for documentation without setting foot onsite.
With increased regulatory compliances, aging infrastructure and rising energy demand, the hydro industry must transform its maintenance and inspections approach.
Even if you are already using drones, robotic crawlers, etc or manually conducting inspections, Augmented Reality holds the potential to enhance the capability of your existing systems of real-time monitoring.
Tools like AR Remote Assistance “ AR Genie Remote Assist” empowers your inspections and maintenance teams to:
In the time when safety regulations , regulatory audits and outdated infrastructure are tightening the pressure on hydro plants, adopting smart inspection, maintenance and support technologies is the necessity.
From a crawler navigating a tight steel pipe to a borescope streaming live video, your remote engineer can evaluate and assess the information in real time and take corrective actions based on visual AR live video streaming. Whether it’s thermal imaging, laser scans, corrosion pattern analysis or nondestructive testing (NDT)-----these all can be integrated with the AR technology to bridge the gap between field expertise and real-time decision making, further driving a collaborative and immersive overall inspection and operational process.
The future of hydro inspections is augmented, remote, and smart, —- and now is the time to embrace it.
So the question is no longer whether or not you should adopt AR– it’s how quickly can you introduce this immersive technology into your plant?
To know more, explore it live by scheduling a free live AR demo here.
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