Launch HN: Voltair (YC W26) – Drone and charging network for power utilities

Hey HN! We’re Hayden, Ronan, Avi, and Warren of Voltair. We’re making weatherized, hybrid-fixed drones deployed for power utility inspections.

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 high voltage sitting on ceramic insulators, usually held up by pieces of wood. When the wood rots or components fail, live conductors can drop on dry vegetation, causing devastating wildfires.

Most utilities solve this with foot patrols, where linemen use binoculars to inspect poles. A lineman can inspect 50-150 poles per day, but even small cooperatives have 50,000 poles, meaning a pole is only inspected every 10 years. Helicopters are expensive ($25k/flight) and dangerous. Satellites lack the precision needed. Drones are the best solution, but current leaders like Skydio and DJI use expensive "drone-in-a-box" solutions ($250k/box) that don't scale easily.

Our first solution involved charging inductively from the magnetic fields around power lines, but we found distribution lines didn't have enough current. We also realized utility engineers found landing on lines too risky.

What we’re building now: We’re making weatherized, long-range (70+ miles), fixed-wing drones that recharge inductively on stripped-down charging pads costing a couple thousand dollars each. These pads also solve the data backhaul problem. When a drone lands, it dumps terabytes of LiDAR and photo data to the station via high-speed WiFi. The station then pushes this to our servers over Starlink or LTE, freeing the drone to continue its mission. This allows for reactive inspections, such as rapid scans after a storm.

Power utilities are our first customers, but applications for telecom, rail, and search+rescue are also exciting. We have zero interest in supporting drone surveillance or weaponization. We just secured our first major contract and our first paid flight is mid-April. Our business model is inspection as a service, charging per pole or tower.