On March 27th, the reporter learned that the new line environmental monitoring device developed by State Grid Shanxi Xintong Company can significantly reduce the labor intensity and manual operation and maintenance costs of personnel going out for inspections. The device weighs less than 1 kilogram and is the size of a mobile phone. After installing it on the transmission line, the staff can easily complete environmental monitoring and real-time data transmission within a range of 500 meters nearby. The operation and maintenance of traditional transmission lines mainly rely on manual inspection and inspection, which is not only time-consuming and inefficient, but also prone to management gaps in remote mountainous areas or places where personnel cannot reach. Even with the use of automated inspection technologies such as drones and line robots, there are still problems such as inability to monitor in real time, and drones and line robots need to rely on high standard communication networks to control and transmit large amounts of data. In order to achieve real-time monitoring of the surrounding environment of transmission lines, especially to solve the prominent problems of difficult coverage of communication signals and data transmission in remote areas and urban cable trenches, in 2023, State Grid Shanxi Information and Communication Company organized an expert innovation team to carry out research on 5G and LPWAN IoT joint networking technology, and successfully launched this new communication technology for transmission scenarios. This technology device has achieved significant results after being installed and tested in cable trenches and transmission lines in remote suburban areas of Taiyuan, Xinzhou, and other places in Shanxi. The relevant person in charge of State Grid Shanxi Communication Company introduced that this achievement can not only achieve real-time monitoring of environmental data such as temperature and humidity, smoke sensing, icing, and harmful gases of power lines in public network signal blind spots, but also accurately locate the location of line faults caused by fire, water accumulation, icing and other disasters within a 500 meter range. The duration of power line fault location has been reduced from 1 day to 3 minutes, greatly improving the speed of fault detection and handling. "After installing the environmental monitoring device for the line, cable and line maintenance personnel only need to use the relevant data monitoring platform to real-time grasp the environmental conditions near each line, greatly reducing the labor intensity and safety risks of personnel going to the site for inspection and outdoor operations." Hu Wei, Deputy Director of State Grid Xinzhou Communication Company, introduced. The reporter learned that the technology device also solves the problem of difficulty in accessing electricity faced by new technologies such as drones and line robots. The new technology device uses button batteries weighing less than 10 grams as the working power supply due to low energy consumption, which can work continuously for 3-5 years. The installation and replacement of the power supply are quite simple. "According to incomplete calculations, if this technology device achieves mass production and promotion, each production cost is about 1000 yuan. According to the calculation of installing one device per 300 meters of cable trench, the upgrade cost per kilometer of trench is less than 4000 yuan. In a city with 1000 kilometers of cable trench, investing 4 million yuan can liberate most workers from heavy and harsh working environments, which has significant promotion and application value," Hu Wei told reporters. (Lai Xin She)