The best of New Zealand’s line mechanics and cable jointers will be going head-to-head in the Waikato, showing off the skills that keep our communities connected right around the country.

Annual Connection 2024, held in conjunction with Connexis, is a prestigious three-day competition that attracts national interest. It sees line mechanic crews and cable jointers from around New Zealand compete in a series of challenges that put their workplace skills to the test.

Annual Connection is also an opportunity for school students to see energy supply workers in action and get a feel for what a career in the industry looks like.

Don't miss your chance to attend the premier event dedicated to the future of wind energy in New Zealand, the NZ Wind Energy Summit.

The Summit is being held on 10-12 September in Wellington and will feature presentations from across NZ and the international wind energy sector.

This year’s over-arching theme, "Our Wind, Our Future", encapsulates wind energy’s critical role to deliver our future clean energy needs. Aotearoa’s wind resource is not only abundant, but it is world class in terms of sustained wind quality, which we should all embrace. The secondary theme of this year’s event is focused on the wind sector's ability to provide energy security to the grid. While wind is intermittent on a short-term basis, we have 21 wind farms and 661 turbines operating in real time (a total of 1.26 GW installed), with capacity factors far greater than what is observed in other jurisdictions. New Zealand’s wind farm geographic diversity and high-capacity factors, therefore, enable the sector to deliver critical energy at times when we need it most.

After working with more than 50 utilities around the world, successful low-voltage analytics projects follow a “stabilisation” path by focusing on strategies any electricity distributor can adopt, including:

Pilot for Production A Best in Suite mindset (vs “best in breed”) Think Platforms

The following is an extract of Future Grid’s paper to be presented at the EEA2024 Conference (https://confer.nz/eea2024) being held at Te Pae, Christchurch from 10 - 12 September.

Introduction to Stabilisation

Mercury NZ has around 573,000 electricity customer connections. In the future the energy data management software robotron*esales will manage Mercury’s LCOM division, where 7000 ICPs including all generation plants will be billed.

Along with managing all billing relevant tasks, the software will handle quotation calculation and market communication for Mercury.

Mercury is helping move Aotearoa New Zealand to a low emissions future through generating electricity from 100 per cent renewable sources: hydro, geothermal and wind, and Robotron is proud to help!

The function of transformer oil in a power transformer is to perform several critical functions such as cooling, insulation, arc suppression, lubrication, and corrosion prevention. As critical power infrastructures age, power outages are one of the most critical threats to the grid.

A power transformer is considered one of the backbones of the modern electrical grid. It needs to be dependable to always ensure a resilient and stable power system. TotalEnergies transformer oil provides this protection by cooling transformer components such as the core and windings and insulating them. This ensures that wear and corrosion are protected against, as well as dangerous overheating and the breakdown of transformer materials.

Future Grid is helping more and more EDBs “leapfrog” peers on their LV analytics journey comes integrated with Vector NODS, retailers and major transformer monitor vendors supporting EDBs with LV hosting capacity and Dynamic Operating Envelopes for load management

Future Grid has been developing AMI analytics software for EDBs for over 10 years. A pioneer of low voltage visibility using smart meter data, Future Grid began its journey in Australia, where its software is in production with 95% of Australian distribution networks. The ability to detect network faults in real-time and with high accuracy has driven this adoption, however DER compliance and voltage management are now primary features deployed.

New Zealand’s female secondary school students are taking their place among New Zealand’s major energy companies to try out different career opportunities as the industry looks to solve critical skills shortages.

Throughout May and June, female school students from around the country will take part in an industry experience day, onsite with lines companies and at some of the country’s major electrical supply projects, as part of Girls with Hi-Vis® (GWHV). While there, they’ll get hands-on experience of the skills required by the electrical supply industry and hear from women already working in the sector.

In the evolving landscape of New Zealand's energy distribution, leveraging low voltage data from smart meters is opening up new avenues for EDBs. Thanks to the availability of raw meter data from leading MEP Bluecurrent, EDBs across the country are now able to explore and benefit from the availability of MEP data.

Over the past six months, we've witnessed an acceleration in growth within this space, propelled by the introduction of international companies to the NZ market. Their introduction has led to this sector's expansion, providing EDBs with unprecedented opportunities to explore and leverage LV data. Potential use cases are being imagined, and structured processes for requirements gathering are being developed. Industry bodies, including Ara Ake, have played a pivotal role through their decarbonisation challenge, bringing LV data and visualisation providers to the forefront.

A key training provider for the Electricity Supply Industry (ESI) in New Zealand is focusing its attention on programmes that meet employers' future needs, as the training sector undergoes another period of change.

Connexis, training provider for infrastructure trades including ESI, civil, telecommunications and water, has committed to working closely with employers both as an advocate for their needs as the government reviews the delivery of industry training, and to ensure the development of training programmes is consistent and relevant.

We are fortunate in New Zealand to have renewable energy sources providing most – 82 per cent – of our electricity. This includes hydro, geothermal, wind and solar.

The figure below shows the greenhouse gas inventory and breakdown of emissions by industry during 1990-2019. The energy sector was responsible for 42 per cent of gross emissions. This can be categorised into sub-groups like transport, other sources of energy, and electricity, their respective contributions being 20 per cent, 17 per cent and 5 per cent of gross emissions. Though our electricity industry is a small contributor compared to other industries, there is a huge opportunity to decarbonise its sector.

A collaboration between WMAC and Smartco gives EDBs even more low voltage network insights in a single solution.

Two-way flows and a host of new loads were never allowed for in network design. When investment was ‘cheap’ and New Zealand’s low voltage distribution networks could overspecify transformers and other infrastructure, it was perhaps inconceivable that the day would come so quickly when they could not accommodate decarbonisation and electrification with available resources. As the predicted bow wave approaches, the same ‘gold plating’ approach to distribution infrastructure is this time simply unachievable for EDBs, and more sophisticated operational and planning decisions are the only way forward. These decisions rely entirely on a class of asset that network managers are a lot less familiar with. The asset is not physical infrastructure, the asset is DATA.

The best of New Zealand’s cable jointers and line mechanics will be going head-to-head in Invercargill in September, showing off the skills that keep the country’s electricity connected.

Annual Connection 2023, hosted by Southland’s electricity management company PowerNet Ltd, in conjunction with Connexis | Te Pūkenga, will see cable jointers and line mechanic crews compete in events that put their workplace skills to the test.

This year’s event will be held 19-21 September at Donovan Park in Invercargill, with electrical supply crews travelling from different companies around the country to participate.