Optical thermo scanners have many uses in the electrical industry, for one it is a safe way to test terminations for high resistance faults that are leading to a failure with out making contact with live parts or moving parts, testing breakers, buss connections, motors, bearings, transformers, coils on contactors, and just about anything that will heat up as a sign of failure is a good preventive maintenance method to avoiding future failures or looking for intermediate power losses.
At work we have both IR scanners as well as thermo-imaging cameras, the cameras can be used for even more things and give you a method of capturing an image of the problem for substantiation that a repair is needed, with a camera you can see right where the heat is at and sometimes can see the parts inside of the breakers that are causing it, also you can capture images from a distance so you can see failures on HV power line connections that normally you would not want to be close to.