29 November 2024
Essential Energy has made significant inroads into managing vegetation that may cause a bushfire around its network of more than 1.4 million power poles, according to the latest electricity network safety report.
Following delays caused by continued wet weather in several regional communities, Essential Energy and its contracted service providers performed more than 120,000 trimming tasks and removed 14,767 hazardous trees during the 2023-24 reporting period.
The report says Essential Energy’s focus on vegetation management backlogs following the impact of wet weather, particularly during major floods in 2022, made marked improvements in the safety of the network and the prevention of bushfires.
The vegetation management team’s progress was also benchmarked favourably for efficiency and effectiveness with electricity utilities in Australia, North America and Europe.
There has been continued progress in the Bushfire Priority Zone Transition project, where Essential Energy partnered with the University of Melbourne to build on bushfire consequence modelling and reprioritise areas of the network with the highest consequence of a network-initiated fire. This helps establish the asset and vegetation inspection and maintenance programs that manage our high bushfire risk areas.
The risk of bushfires was further reduced with the completion of all 119,124 inspections of the network as part of the annual Pre-Summer Bushfire Inspection Program.
An Essential Energy crew making repairs to the network.
The report also highlighted the migration to a new asset management system which has strengthened Essential Energy’s ability to efficiently analyse the condition of the network, including how often assets are inspected and when they should be replaced.
The new Enterprise Asset Management solution strengthens the organisation’s ability to track, monitor and analyse data from network assets, along with improved integration with other systems. This significantly uplifts the capability to meet licence conditions, operate safely, and efficiently analyse the condition of the network.
Key aspects of this year’s report include a continued reduction in the number of asset failures. This includes items such as streetlighting and power poles, crossarms, insulators and conductor ties.
The 2023-24 Essential Energy Electricity Network Safety Management System (ENSMS) report details incidents, asset and vegetation management activities, the number of inspections undertaken, and remedial tasks identified and completed.
The report covers Essential Energy’s operations to build and maintain one of Australia’s largest electricity distribution networks, which services 890,000 customers across regional, rural and remote communities. The network traverses 737,000 square kilometres of landscape from the desert to the coast, across alpine to sub-tropical.
