T&D World: Endeavour Energy’s experience mitigating flood risk
As Endeavour Energy’s Chief Asset and Operating Officer, Scott Ryan has responsibility for grid transformation, asset management and delivery operations for the safe and reliable supply of electricity to over one million customers.
Mitigate Flood Risk with Digital Twin
Millions of people in Sydney, Australia’s Greater West and beyond rely on Endeavour Energy to provide a safe and reliable electricity supply around the clock. Despite the challenging conditions of the region’s harsh environment — subject to heat waves, flooding, drought and wildfires — Endeavour Energy has embraced technology to continue powering Australia’s third largest economy to a brighter future.
With an estimated value of AU$6.7 billion (at the time of this writing), Endeavour Energy’s network spans more than 25,000 sq km (9653 sq miles). It is made up of more than 430,000 power poles and streetlight columns, 207 major substations and 32,600 distribution substations connected by nearly 60,600 km (37,655 miles) — more than the distance from Sydney to London and back — of underground and overhead cables. It also integrates with renewable energy sources, including 220,000 residential solar connections, industrial solar and embedded large-scale batteries. To make agile decisions to manage its vast network, Endeavour Energy has embraced an engineering-grade digital twin to support delivery of a safe, reliable, secure and affordable electricity supply to more than 2.6 million Australians.
Digital twin technology is used across many different industries. For power utilities, digital twins can now create a 3-D model of the network to optimize investments, identify and mitigate risk, and streamline operations. Endeavour Energy adopted digital twin technology from Neara. Whereas many digital twins provide a lot of detail at a small scale, or little detail at a large scale, Neara’s engineering-grade model provides granular detail but on a large scale — enabling complex engineering-grade analysis automatically across the entirety of a whole network.
This article appears on the T&D World website. Read the full article here.