Employees of the State Grid Corp of China, the world's largest utility company, are embracing the latest technological innovations to safeguard the reliable operations of the country's power grid.

For years, State Grid employees in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region have faced notable challenges in urban regions — tree barriers to urban line corridors, difficult maintenance and unexpected power outages.

To address these challenges, the State Grid Xinjiang Electric Power Co introduced live-line operation robots in July 2022 that are designed to reduce power safety hazards by trimming and removing tree barriers without interruption to the power supply.

Mi Pengpeng, who is in charge of the live-line operation team at State Grid Xinjiang Electric Power, said, "Using robots to replace traditional live-line operations has greatly improved the quality and efficiency of obstacle clearance while reducing the safety risks and intensity of live-line operations."

After achieving new breakthroughs in projects such as attaching the ground ring to the robot, installing bird repellents and disconnecting drain lines, the company actively explored the integration of live-line operation robots with laser clearing devices.

After nine months of experimentation and through joint efforts of the innovation team, they raised the power of a traditional laser gun from 500W to 1,500W, achieving an improved parallel, fast and precise cutting effect within 3 meters.

In just two minutes, a 10 cm tree trunk can be split in half, raising work efficiency by 11.5 times, Mi said, adding that this effectively resolves the long-standing difficulty faced by frontline personnel in clearing tree obstacles.

The application of this innovative technology on live-line operation robots by the State Grid Xinjiang employees was also a first in China, he said.

Xu Chen, Mi's colleague, noted that so far this year, the company has used live-line operation robots nearly 100 times, clearing nearly 260 tree barriers using the "robot + laser blade" technology.

Xu said that in the next stage, the company will continue to explore new technologies for intelligent distribution network replacements, gradually realizing the application of robot operations in more distribution network scenarios without power interruption, and accelerating the pace of intelligent distribution network replacements.