Prior to Gecko’s partnership with the customer utility, there had been an unplanned outage event which caused 20,000 customers to lose power. The outage caused total electric production output to drop by 55.6% for the plant. As a result, the plant was looking to complete a full inspection of a variety of their plant assets to reduce the likelihood of a recurring outage.

To maximize value and minimize inspection time during their planned outage, the plant decided to work with Gecko’s robotic inspection solution. As a coal power plant, reducing costs and outage events are vital to the continued operation of the plant, as political and environmental pressure to significantly reduce emissions while maintaining cost per KwH advantages over renewable energy. In addition, significantly reducing outages help maintain the electricity production dependability advantage of coal over inconsistent renewable energies.

To achieve these lofty goals, a complete inspection of the plant assets was essential. Executing inspections on the entire fleet of assets was a challenge, given that some of the assets and asset sections were not able to be inspected via robotic methods. The solution involved an innovative approach by the Gecko Robotics Inspection Team (GRIT).