Engineering, Technology & Innovation: Amping up to present at the 2018 EEA Conference

From Grid Technology in the Hawke’s Bay to Achieving Electrical Safety on Metal Pipelines, five members of our Power team will be presenting thought-provoking papers at the 2018 Electricity Engineers' Association (EEA) Conference on the 20-22 June at SKYCITY Convention Centre, Auckland, New Zealand.

The EEA Conference and Trade Exhibition is New Zealand’s largest power industry event, bringing together national and international experts on engineering, technology and innovation platforms that are reshaping the power industry.

The five Beca presenters, and their papers, are:

Jamie Walton (with Peter McClean, Pioneer Energy): Six Stations, One Set-point – Teviot Hydro Scheme Automatic Optimal Dispatch

The Teviot River Hydro Scheme has six cascaded hydro power stations on the Teviot River between Lake Onslow and Roxburgh (Central Otago, New Zealand). Owned by Pioneer Energy, the Teviot Scheme makes up close to half of Pioneer's Hydro Power portfolio. Jamie and Peter describe the commercial benefits and approach used for implementing a Model Predictive Control system using a Mixed Integer Linear Program solver.

Glenn Jowett (authored by John Fallow, Beca): BIM: Modernising Digital Delivery for the Power Sector

BIM (Building Information Modelling) is being used across different industries, has been mandated in several jurisdictions, and is delivering significant benefits for those embracing it. In the power industry, the adoption of BIM has been limited despite the potential to deliver significant benefits such as better stakeholder co-ordination, elimination of design issues prior to construction, reduced project timeframes, lower whole of life cost, improved access to asset information during operation, and the ever important improvements to safety.

Kerry Jenkins: Grid Technology and the Hawke’s Bay

With the constraints of existing 220 kV lines and interconnector transformers supplying the Hawke’s Bay region and their legacy protection schemes, Transpower has been looking to implement a number of initiatives to improve the security of supply to this region. Kerry Jenkins outlines the works required to facilitate some unusual protection and control schemes, and the advantages of having standard protection platforms with sufficient flexibility for innovative applications.

Dr. Rodney Urban (with Nick Wyatt, Aurora Energy Ltd): An Improved Distribution Earthing and Lightning Protection Design Process for High Resistivity Soils

The design, construction and maintenance of distribution earthing systems is relatively consistent across New Zealand. The primary acceptance criterion for these installations is a target earth resistance that facilitates reliable operation of protection, maintains a reasonable voltage rise during an earth fault and dissipates lightning currents into the ground. Dr. Rodney Urban and Nick Wyatt provide an overview of the process developed for the design, commissioning and ongoing maintenance of Aurora’s distribution earthing and lightning protection systems.

Terrence Ibasco (with Kelvin Stewart, First Gas Ltd): The 400-Site Challenge: Achieving Electrical Safety on Metal Pipelines

Voltages and currents impressed on buried metal pipelines by the mechanisms of Earth Potential Rise (EPR) and Low Frequency Induction (LFI) present a safety risk to maintenance and operation personnel in contact with the pipelines. These hazards are present through both normal power transfer along nearby transmission and distribution lines and through earth faults at towers, poles and substations. First Gas engaged Beca AMEC (now Wood Beca) to audit over 400 of its station and pipeline anode earth bed installations. This paper presents the approach adopted to accurately measure the earth resistance in an efficient way.

This year the conference programme offers a diverse range of strategic and technical sessions on technology, innovation, best practice, case studies, solutions and practical developments from New Zealand and overseas generation, network, engineering and safety practitioners.

Contact us here if you would like to discuss the papers above or to get in touch with one of the presenters.

For further information on the conference, visit the conference website.