Along a mountain ridge in northern Laos' Oudomxay Province, a 20-story tower rises. Then another. Linked in a line, they carry power stretching to the north.

Above the 60 — to 70-meter towers, the whir of rotors cuts through the air. Along this cross-border transmission route, drones equipped with artificial intelligence have become a routine presence. They can identify as many as 15 types of defects, including early signs of forest fires.

"Before, inspecting a line took a full day. Now, with drones, it takes just two hours," said Khamphong Phonekeo, head of a drone inspection team at Electricite du Laos Transmission Company, or EDL-T. "It saves time and labor, and it can detect risks that are difficult to spot from the ground."

This is a typical scene from the China-Laos 500-kilovolt interconnection project, which began operations on Monday. Linking power networks in northern Laos' Oudomxay and Luang Namtha provinces with Xishuangbanna in Southwest China's Yunnan province, the project consists of 145 kilometers of transmission lines in China and 32.5 kilometers in Laos. It is the largest and highest-voltage cross-border alternating current (AC) interconnection project jointly built by the two countries to date.

According to EDL-T, the project increases the bidirectional power exchange capacity from 50 megawatts to 1,500 megawatts, enabling the delivery of about 3 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity annually — equivalent to reducing roughly 2.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Xie Min, deputy general manager of EDL-T, said technologies, including drones, have been involved throughout the project, from early surveying to ongoing maintenance. During construction, more than 30 drones and two helicopters formed aerial work teams, minimizing ecological disruption on the ground.

In Laos, the standard clearing radius around each tower base is 70 meters. With advanced technology, however, construction teams were able to limit the width of vegetation clearing corridors to just 22 meters, ultimately reducing tree cutting by 83.4 percent.

In areas frequented by Asian elephants, developers relied on an ecosystem of monitoring tools, including drones, infrared cameras and an elephant early-warning app, to track herds in real time, ensuring that construction and wildlife movements did not interfere with one another, he said.