When the Hawkesbury region in NSW was hit with flooding at levels not seen in 30 years, it caused thousands of customers to lose power.

As the flood waters receded, Endeavour Energy was faced with the challenge of determining when and where the waters had receded sufficiently to enable it to restore power.

The electricity network operator serves 2.7 million people across Sydney’s Greater West, the Blue Mountains, Southern Highlands, Illawarra and South Coast.

In the past, the only way it was able to determine when and where the waters had receded was by boots-on-the-ground manual inspections.

Now, it has created a digital twin representation of its network in the region using the Neera platform, and is feeding this with IoT sensor data on water levels gathered by web scraping the public WaterNSW website to get near real-time information on river heights.

This data has enabled Endeavour Energy to determine the extent of flooding across the entire Hawkesbury region.

By feeding this data into Neera staff in the office can now identify clearances between floodwaters and powerlines enabling them to determine when it is safe to restore power to particular sections of the network and to coordinate with contractors charged with restoring power to individual premises.

The company says it believes this to be the first combination of an electricity network digital twin model and near real-time flood modelling in Australia, and has brought three specific benefits to its flood response.

• The ability to proactively model predicted flooding against its network to better inform switching plans and minimise outages in real time.
• The ability to compare real-time data to the modelled and expected event, enabling the re-evaluation of any network that may require de-energisation that had not been identified with the modelled or predicted levels.
•  The ability to view the actual impact of the flooding on its network. This reduces inspection times and reenergisation time, enabling the company to make better use of teams in the areas impacted.

Endeavour Energy says the system has reduced the number of assets requiring inspection prior to power restoration by 80 percent, which represents a return of more than 200 percent on its investment in the project.

The digital twin model has also enabled the company to be proactive in its flood mitigation efforts: it is able to simulate various flood scenarios and redesign its network to minimise the impact from such events.

“This will improve the safety of the community in natural disasters by reducing power disruptions to customers in the Hawkesbury region by up to 40 percent in a one-in-100-year flood,” the company stated.

And an excellent example is provided by Endeavour Energy, operator of the electricity network serving 2.7 million people across Sydney’s Greater West, the Blue Mountains, Southern Highlands, Illawarra and South Coast.

Endeavour Energy’s IoT installation is a finalist in the Energy category of the 2023 IoT Awards. Meet the finalists at IoT Impact 2023,a one day conference in Sydney on 23 May.

IoT Impact includes a session examining how IoT solutions can provide real-time data and insights to support early warning systems, evacuation plans and disaster response efforts. See the agenda and purchase tickets to IoT Impact 2023.