Georgina Price, BECA

Georgina graduated with first class honours in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Auckland in 2018. After graduating, Georgina joined Beca as a power systems engineer and now has over two and half years' experience in the industry. She has been working on a diverse range of projects involving wind farms, transformer replacements and cable design. Georgina's main passion and reason for pursuing engineering is to help bring New Zealand closer towards its 100% renewable energy goal. In the past year at Beca she has been leading the Power Sustainability working group which helps to inspire fellow engineers to pursue sustainable designs and outcomes.

A Case Study on CUWLP: Future Proofing the New Zealand Grid through Sustainable Innovations

The Clutha Upper Waitaki Lines Project (CUWLP) commenced to meet the ongoing electricity needs of New Zealand by increasing the capacity on the transmission lines in the Clutha and Upper Waitaki Valley regions. The improvements are designed to assist with the challenges a dry period can bring to Southland's network and enable future additional renewable generation to be exported from the Southland region. CUWLP also addresses the potential closure of Tiwai Point aluminium smelter as there is an opportunity to move the surplus hydro electricity generated from Manapouri from the South to the North.

Along with the upgrades to the transmission lines, CUWLP requires thermal upgrades to the substations along the route as the electricity requirements exceeds the present capacity of some of the substation equipment and components. Improvements to the Roxburgh Power Station, Naseby Substation and Livingstone Substation have been achieved in an innovative way through smart designs and clever reuse of existing infrastructure. By thinking about designs differently and questioning standard solutions, sustainable innovations were achieved. The quantity of steel and concrete, transportation requirements and site waste have been reduced as a result.

Jessica Silcock, Meridian Energy

Jessica is a Reliability Engineer for Meridian Energy, based out of Christchurch. After graduating from the University of Canterbury in 2019, she was positioned down in Twizel as an electrical engineering graduate before moving on to her permanent role in the Reliability team early in 2021. Within her role, Jess gets the opportunity to work with a range of different people in varying departments. She is currently working on managing plant information and data upgrades, developing online condition monitoring tests, setting up maintenance procedures and reviewing event responses.

A Change in How We Consider Our maintenance Strategies

Gone are the days of reactive maintenance where we only repair equipment after it has already failed. Proactive maintenance is now a standard practice in most generation sites but is there now a competition within this strategy between predictive vs preventative maintenance?

We rely heavily on routine maintenance to monitor the condition of our assets, sometimes so much so that it is all we seem to be doing. This is primarily due to constraints on resources and outages which results in maintenance at a fixed time spread out across sites. Although this decreases the risk of fluctuating maintenance demands, there has not been a reduction in the amount of man hours and work required to keep our power stations running. Plant outages are longer to accommodate the routine maintenance and in turn increases carbon emissions associated with unnecessary maintenance and plant unavailability.

With the continuous uptake in modern technologies, online condition monitoring is now being used in parallel with routine maintenance to understand plant performance. We can therefore move away from routine maintenance and rely more heavily on online condition monitoring to reduce our emissions and resourcing. In the end, online condition monitoring can allow us to have a better understanding of asset risks and hence focus our maintenance activities and achieve better outcomes with less resources.