Drones inspect UK’s first ever eco-depot

Image courtesy heliguy

Durham County Council tested the innovative ‘drone-in-a-box’ from North Shields-based firm heliguy to monitor the 23-acre solar site powering its multimillion pound Morrison Busty depot (above).

Previously, the process took several days with staff inspecting the site on foot with handheld thermal scanners.

However, a drone inspection using a DJI M3TD thermal drone took just 80 minutes, helping the council save valuable time and resources.

The inspection was carried out by skilled pilots from heliguy, which conducts automated drone operations and is a drone supplier and training specialist.



Staff launched the drone from inside a DJI Dock 2, which can be based on-site and can instantly send a device airborne on-demand. The technology has been heralded as transformative for everything from security patrols to turbine and pipeline inspections and can potentially even unearth problems a human may miss.

Alex Williams, Technical Geospatial Specialist at heliguy said: “Defects that are invisible to the naked eye can present themselves clearly using infrared. In the case of solar panels, this may be due to disconnected lines or faulty panels.

“Being able to identify these issues with the speed and efficiency of drones can save valuable time, as there is no need for in-person physical inspection.”

Morrison Busty reopened as a low-carbon site in 2023 following a £8.3 million makeover, as part of the eco-friendly authority’s plans to cut carbon emissions from its operations by 80% by 2030, with the goal of becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050.



The eco-depot includes a solar farm, battery storage facility, private wire distribution network and an extensive electric vehicle charging system and saves an estimated 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

Maintenance is vital so utilising drone-in-a-box technology enables the council to stage more frequent inspections, meaning staff can identify and fix any issues quicker.

Louise Austin, Senior Carbon and Energy Officer at Durham County Council, said: “The solar farm is a vital asset to the Morrison Busty depot, so inspections are vital to ensure it is operating effectively.

“To manually collect data for this field you have to walk down each row of these solar panels and take photographs of what you find. It’s time-intensive, can be inaccessible at certain times of the year, it is easy to miss things and you don’t get the detail that we’ve seen from the drone.

“The drone allows real-time data collection – which you don’t necessarily get with handheld scanners – and the Dock enables data to be collected when required, all-year round.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a pivotal role, with the new systems monitored and controlled by a Smart City AI management system to ensure optimal operation of the PV, battery storage and electric vehicle charging systems and the monitoring and recording of system performance data. The drone data can also be fed into this AI system to provide deeper insights,

Chris Jones, Principal Programme and Project Manager at Durham County Council, added: “The AI management system is connected to every section of the depot.

“It shows the savings that are being generated against previous years’ data, and as it learns it will start to remember that certain things will happen at certain times of the year and it can start to make predictions. Nobody has done this before on this type of scale.

“This DJI Dock 2 linked into our current systems could be a game-changer.”