[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Voltair (YC W26) - Drone and charging net...
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Launch HN: Voltair (YC W26) - Drone and charging network for power
utilities
Hey HN! We're Hayden, Ronan, Avi, and Warren of Voltair
(https://voltairlabs.com/). We're making weatherized, hybrid-fixed
drones deployed for power utility inspections. Here's some
footage:
https://vimeo.com/1173862237/ac28095cc6?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=... and
a photo of our latest prototype: https://imgur.com/a/bYHnqZ4. The
U.S. has 7M miles of power lines (enough to go to the moon and back
14 times), and they're aging. Over 50% of all power flows through
transformers that are at least 30 years old, which is about when
they start to fail. Power line conductors are just bare metal with
4,000-765,000 volts sitting on ceramic insulators, usually held up
by pieces of wood. It's a cost effective and relatively reliable
way to move power. But when the wood starts to rot, or the cotter
pin falls out, and a live conductor is dropped on a dead tree on a
windy day, you get devastating wildfires like the Palisades Fire in
LA last year. Most utilities solve this problem with foot patrols.
Linemen drive out with a clipboard or an iPad, and run through a
checklist with binoculars to visually confirm everything is in
order. A lineman can inspect about 50-150 poles per day, yet even
the smallest rural electric cooperatives (with about ~20 employees)
have about 50,000 distribution poles. Clearly the math doesn't work
out. As a result, a given utility pole is inspected about every 10
years (at least that's what they tell their insurance adjuster).
Helicopters are also used, but cost $25k to get off the ground, and
more importantly, every year linemen die in helicopter crashes.
Satellites can't deliver the mm precision needed for these
inspections. So drones have emerged as the best solution. Georgia
Power saved 60% on operating expenses when they switched to using
drones, and Xcel power found drones to find 60% more defects than
foot patrols (because of pole-top vantage point). Problem #2:
Drones are held back by the need to constantly recharge and FAA
beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) regulations. In response, the
most well funded utilities (e.g., PG&E, SCE) primarily send out
pilots in trucks to collect the data. Current leaders in the drone
space - Skydio and DJI - have built drone-in-a-box solutions. Their
charging stations have inherent concurrency constraints (only one
drone at a time) and don't scale easily over large land areas.
Skydio charges $250,000 / box, and has a there-and-back range of
about 15 miles (assuming ideal performance). They are expensive and
inflexible. Our first solution (and why it didn't work): We
entered YC wanting to build drones that charge inductively from the
magnetic fields around power lines. We used a split-core current
transformer, wrapped it around the conductor with a clamp, and
harvested power. We spent about 4 months testing and developing
this hardware, and successfully recharged a few batteries in the
field. It was a really cool proof of concept. But we ran into a
big problem. There's not enough current on distribution lines!
These are the wooden poles outside your home, as opposed to the
tall steel transmission towers you might see in the countryside.
Generally speaking, we needed about a MW of power - or about 1000
homes - to flow through the lines to charge our drone performantly.
We also found the risk-reward calculus didn't make sense for
utilities. Line attachments (and even inductive power harvesting)
is common in the utility space. Fault indicators and smart sensors
like the Heimdall Power "Neuron" do this. But they are installed
one time with lineman supervision and left in place for years. The
risk of landing a drone multiple times per day at myriad points
around the network felt too risky for utility engineers. We
wondered if we could solve the range and battery swap issue from
another angle. Reexamining drone-in-a-box solutions, we realized
they had the tech backwards: expensive, overengineered boxes to
protect fragile drones. A network of these big enough to cover a
utility's service area would cost hundreds of millions, and the
drones still wouldn't be able to fly when it matters most (during a
wildfire, storm, or power outage). What if instead, the drone was
ultra-rugged while the charging stations were cheap and attritable?
What we're building now: We're making weatherized, long-range (well
over 70 miles), fixed-wing drones that can live outside for months
at a time. They recharge inductively (no connections or moving
parts) on stripped-down charging pads that cost a couple thousand
dollars apiece. It doesn't take many of these pads along a
transmission line corridor for our drones to hop between them and
inspect the entire length. We reason we could cover the continental
U.S. with about 1000-5000 pads. Having dedicated charging stations
also solves the backhaul problem. When you LiDAR scan and take
high-res photos of 50 miles of transmission corridor, you
accumulate terabytes of data. Manual drone operators can pull out
the SD card. We have to offload it wirelessly. Trying to do this
directly from the drone over spotty LTE doesn't work. Instead, we
use the charging station as an intermediary, dumping the data from
our drone to a hard drive on the station over a high-speed WiFi
link. The station can then push this to our servers over Starlink,
LTE, or a fiber link asynchronously, freeing the drone to get back
in the field and inspect more. One cool thing we can do this way
is reactive inspections. If there's a weird harmonic on a feeder,
or a utility needs a rapid scan after a storm, we can get on-site
within minutes to inspect. Contractors often spend months
coordinating their on-site data collection, and dedicated storm
response contractors are very expensive to keep on-site. Power
utilities are our first customers, but the applications for
telecom, rail, oil+gas, forestry, search+rescue, and agriculture
are also exciting. One thing that's _not_ exciting is a drone
surveillance state. Unfortunately, we are now in a world where
drones are increasingly weaponized, and examples of government
overreach are numerous (case in point: Sonoma County, California
spying on landowners). We have zero interest in supporting uses
like this. (Our backstory, if you're interested: Ronan has always
had an unhealthy obsession with flying machines, from designing
remote controlled planes growing up, to building eVTOL tech for
DARPA and the Air Force while still a university student. Warren
and Ronan met during a startup competition with a UAV solution in
agriculture. Hayden, a childhood friend of Ronan, was deeply
ingrained in the power utility space, and realized the true pain
point there. Shortly after graduating, Ronan, Hayden, and Warren
quit their jobs to take the idea full time in the Summer of 2025.
Around the same time Avi dropped out of college, bringing sales
skill and regulatory expertise as our fourth cofounder.) We just
secured our first major contract and are working out the details of
pilots with some big utilities. Our first paid flight is mid-April.
Our business model is straightforward: inspection as a service. We
charge per pole or tower. We are very interested in your opinion!
Maybe some of you all work in the energy industry and know a thing
or two about infrastructure inspections that we could learn from?
We'd love all feedback (good and bad).
Author : wweissbluth
Score : 41 points
Date : 2026-03-19 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
| codingrightnow wrote:
| How does this get around the problem you mentioned with FAA line
| of sight regulations?
| codingrightnow wrote:
| Follow up question, why aerial drones? Couldn't crawler drones
| work and avoid FAA regulations? Though obviously would be
| limited in speed and where lines have been damaged, though
| perhaps they could be managed to go around the damage via
| remote control.
| wweissbluth wrote:
| Crawler drones are not a bad idea! They're just a bit slow
| and limiting. Also doesn't drive our long term plan (can't
| leave power lines)
|
| It's also mechanically complex and there's many line & pole
| types that make it challenging to build for.
|
| When we let go of distribution line charging, we considered
| this idea. Off some rough calcs we thought there would be
| lines that we'd get 'stuck' on so that was hard to
| overcome...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not all lines are on nice level land. Transmission lines go
| through some rugged terrain. I've seen some distribution
| lines that are in pretty rugged areas as well. They also
| mentioned the top down view was advantageous compared to a
| ground pounder's view, so a crawler would loose that view as
| well.
|
| Delivery drones are leaving line of sight and yet they are
| operating. The Walmart near me started delivery late last
| year, and they are buzzing my area many times a day. I'd hope
| with enough testing these guys can work with the FAA to get
| certified to remove this limit.
| avigotskind wrote:
| There's no real way around BVLOS regs right now. The real
| problem is BVLOS + need to recharge. If you only solve one, you
| get limited value. Distributed charging without BVLOS is kind
| of useless. If a human still has to be there to maintain visual
| line of sight, it doesn't make much of a difference if the
| drone can recharge itself in the field. BVLOS without
| distributed charging also hits a value ceiling. You're still
| constrained by battery swaps.
|
| So the solution here is a deep understanding of FAA BVLOS
| waiver processes + a drone/pad network that is actually
| scalable.
|
| That said, this is another benefit of working with utilities.
| When you're inspecting power line corridors, you're often
| operating in what the FAA calls "shielded area." In practice,
| that just means you're flying close to infrastructure that
| other aircraft tend to avoid anyway. That makes deconfliction
| much simpler, which in turn makes BVLOS waivers more attainable
| under Part 107.
|
| The bigger shift is Part 108, which is expected to be finalized
| relatively soon, and should lower the barrier to BVLOS at
| scale.
| igor47 wrote:
| No feedback, this just sounds really cool.
| wangmander wrote:
| Is the inspection data you're accumulating becoming a moat in
| itself?
| wweissbluth wrote:
| We don't need to keep the data - we'd rather sell it to other
| (qualified) folks to build useful tools on top of our data
| platform.
|
| Think verifying hail claim insurance for farmers (no need to
| send a guy out there), or helping NOAA assist truck drivers
| with weather conditions on interstates etc. etc. (the list is
| very long)
|
| Maybe we'll cover all that surface area ourselves, but that
| sounds pretty challenging.
|
| A good proxy is satellite companies. They're typically just a
| API call for data, not full-stack collection + analysis.
|
| For utilities, we'll probably stay vertical, so that we have
| our first 'application' to bring our data to market. We'll see.
|
| Also - at scale we're excited to help build physical world
| models with our data. To be seen if this is something we'd do
| in-house.
|
| We're super excited to help new startups build data that were
| never possible before with the extreme high cost of data
| collection :D
| macrolet wrote:
| > We're super excited to help new startups build data that
| were never possible before with the extreme high cost of data
| collection :D
|
| I am super interested in making solutions to help startups
| exchange data. Especially for niche data. So if you are
| interested I'd love to get in touch.
| petargyurov wrote:
| At my job [0] we work in this exact space, but on the data
| analytics side of things. We build computer vision pipelines for
| corrosion, components, defects, etc. We process imagery from
| drones, helis and satellite.
|
| This is a tough problem to solve and for a lot of operators
| ultimately comes down to cost.
|
| We're based in the UK but reach out if you wanna chat!
|
| [0] https://keen-ai.com/
| avigotskind wrote:
| Happy to chat! We're 100% focused on data collection, so
| partnering with folks downstream is right up our alley.
|
| And yes-- certainly a tough problem to solve! There's pattern
| we keep seeing in the utility inspection space where teams
| start with a great defect detection or analytics product, then
| try to verticalize by adding data collection, basically
| spinning up a small aviation operation inside a SaaS company.
| I'm sure you've seen this plenty of times. Our hope here is to
| make collection simple enough so that doesn't need to keep
| happening :)
|
| I'll reach out!
| nhecker wrote:
| Sounds like a neat space to be in. Wishing you calm skies next
| month. I guess you'll have all the goodies (RFI detectors,
| thermal imaging sensors, etc.) to collect data? I wonder to what
| extent detection from a distance (discovery?) and investigation
| of faults can be automated. Hopefully using drones for good will
| be sufficient for a viable business model. We've enough
| surveillance as it is.
| wweissbluth wrote:
| We're collecting 61MP RGB, LiDAR (DSM DTM) and radiometric
| thermal for sensors
|
| We're thinking of flying at ~150' AGL or ~100' ATO at over 20
| mph to collect data when automated. There's trade offs between
| effective speed, localized navigation, and mission planning.
| It's just challenging to build fully automated systems, but
| generally speaking flying higher and faster is more efficient
| and safer (also helps with command-and-control links)
| contingencies wrote:
| Love the name. Perhaps an angle you haven't considered is rapid
| quantitative data gathering for site inspection for rapid setup
| of non-traditional infrastructure like wind and solar. Should be
| zeitgeist with gas prices shooting through the roof. By actually
| being 250-400ft above the proposed site and taking real
| measurements you get actionable insights. Multi-season survey
| ideal but raw data from a specific site has gravitas and seasonal
| inference is straightforward within a confidence interval.
| wweissbluth wrote:
| Interesting! This is new to me. I know wind farm inspection is
| another really solid market (smaller land areas and high
| frequency - could be 1 pad for a whole farm), but I am not
| familiar with the rapid setup renewables. Can you share more?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I worked at a place that provided services to railroad owners.
| This was back in the 90s, but they had camera rigs on engines
| that would record multiple angles along the train routes. They
| would store that footage in massive tape libraries to be used as
| reference to see the terrain in an area that service was needed
| to they'd know what kind of equipment would be necessary as well
| as a visual of the tracks themselves. They could not update the
| footage as fast as they liked. IIRC, footage was over a year old
| before getting updated.
|
| Just another suggestion of a sector you could gain traction as it
| wasn't listed.
| wweissbluth wrote:
| Oh 100% - we think rail would be an excellent market. But as
| you've stated, they already have a thing moving around (the
| train) to take photos.
|
| We see less delta in our service (but still something). There's
| certain perspectives only our aerial vantage point could
| capture, but we're too focused on power utilities right now to
| run that to ground just yet.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sometimes, you might be able to get a twofer, in that
| transmission lines often run very near tracks. However,
| somebody would be getting inferior imagery if they weren't
| the focus of the camera. But if the tracks are near enough to
| your lines with chargers installed, it might still allow some
| low hanging fruit after your initial client win. Maybe make
| your base stations cable of handling two drones; one for the
| power lines, the second for the tracks. I'm more rambling
| than tempting your focus. Just fun to think about.
|
| Curious, does a straight flyover of lines/towers/poles offer
| the footage necessary, or do you have to orbit the support
| structure to see enough detail? That would obviously add much
| more time/expense.
| zanderz wrote:
| I got a survey of my residential property, 1/2 acre on a rugged
| hillside, from a guy who used a drone equipped with lidar. It was
| $4,000, less than traditional methods, but it would be cool if a
| drone could just be dispatched from a nearby power pole instead.
| OrbitHigher48 wrote:
| honest question, how is this different from what X already does?
| Uncle_Clark wrote:
| I work for a utility company and this is brilliant. One other
| issue that comes into play for inspections is right of way. My
| understanding of this is a bit fuzzy but is very interesting.
| Back in the day, if a power company had a transmission line on
| the property, they could just go out and service it. With modern
| infrastructure frequently being on top of one another, power
| lines, internet cables, pipes, this becomes a more complicated
| issue and so property management and the ability to access sites
| becomes a question. Drones can frequently go where people can't
| so in thick vegetation I can see this really working for
| surveying. Very cool.
| nsollazzo53 wrote:
| interesting space. who are you competing with?
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