Arva

Background

Arva AS is one of the three major power providers in northern Norway, responsible for maintaining and developing the electricity distribution network across the Troms and Nordland regions. The area’s challenging geography, vast distances, and severe weather conditions make maintaining grid reliability both critical and complex.

To strengthen operational efficiency and grid reliability, Arva set out to modernize its inspection process. The goal was to move from manual and helicopter-based inspections toward a fully digital, drone-based process—one that could deliver comprehensive condition data across both regular annual inspections and more detailed assessments, while reducing safety risks and environmental impact.

The challenge

Transitioning to a drone-based inspection model required a new ecosystem of technologies and partners. Arva needed a setup that could handle:

• Regular annual inspections (Linjeinspeksjon) — large-scale reviews of the grid focused on identifying urgent and safety-critical defects.
  
• Detailed inspections (Toppkontroll) — in-depth condition assessments identifying a wide range of potential issues across components.
  

The challenge wasn’t just collecting the data. Drone operations produce hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images and LiDAR point clouds—far more than could be reviewed manually. To make the shift viable, Arva needed an AI-powered analysis platform capable of turning this vast volume of data into actionable insights quickly, accurately, and at scale.

The solution

To achieve this, Arva partnered with Airpelago, a leader in autonomous drone inspections, and Arkion, a specialist in AI-powered asset analytics for power grids.

Airpelago’s autonomous drones enabled safe, efficient, and high-coverage data capture across Arva’s network, which spans more than 15,000 km of distribution lines. Arkion’s Asset Analytics platform then provided the analytical backbone to transform this data into operational insights.

With Arkion’s solution, Arva could:

• Process large volumes of images and LiDAR data automatically, identifying and classifying defects using AI trained on millions of existing power grid images.
  
• Perform detailed condition assessments, covering everything from missing components to corrosion and mechanical wear.
  
• Run rapid annual inspections, prioritizing critical defects and compliance needs.
  
• Analyze LiDAR data for vegetation management, including ground clearance and vegetation infringement analysis.
  
• Visualize results directly in Arkion’s platform, with integration into existing maintenance and asset management systems for seamless follow-up.
  
  

By combining Arkion’s AI models with expert human QA from Arkion’s internal grid specialists, Arva could benefit from both high speed and high accuracy—detecting more defects at a lower cost than traditional manual methods, while maintaining full confidence in quality and precision.

Impact

Through this collaboration, Arva has successfully established a scalable, future-ready inspection process.

• Increased detection rate: AI-driven analysis identifies significantly more defects and potential issues than traditional reviews.
  
• Faster insight generation: Automated processing shortens turnaround time from data capture to actionable condition reports.
  
• Improved safety and sustainability: Drone operations replace helicopter inspections, reducing both risk and carbon footprint.
  
• Enhanced operational efficiency: Maintenance engineers can focus on planning and prioritization instead of manual data handling.
  
• Comprehensive visibility: Integrated LiDAR and visual insights enable a more holistic understanding of grid condition and vegetation risks.
  

“After many years of manually handling and analyzing condition data, we hope that our collaboration with Airpelago and Arkion will help significantly automate these processes, enabling our maintenance engineers to focus more of their time on maintaining the power grid. Furthermore, we believe that with automated processes and analysis, we will be able to detect critical faults in the grid more quickly, thereby reducing the likelihood of failures and outages. With this, we believe Arkion can help bring Arva into the future.”
— Ragnar Johnsen, Technical Manager, Network Maintenance, Arva

About Arva

Arva AS is one of northern Norway’s leading power distribution companies, responsible for operating and maintaining the electricity grid across the Troms and Nordland regions. With a network spanning more than 15,000 km, Arva ensures safe and reliable energy delivery to homes and businesses in one of Europe’s most demanding environments.