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More robust power system – with less power cuts – coming to your suburb
Power cuts across the Hawkesbury are set to be less widespread and fixed more swiftly thanks to a major ongoing upgrade of Endeavour Energy’s system.
Essentially the upgrade – which has started rolling out across the Hawkesbury and will go fully live towards the end of 2021 – isolates faults in a much more targeted way. This means outages across large areas should be minimised because the system isolates broken or faulty stretches and switches around them.
“At the moment when there’s an incident we need to send a crew into the field to manually switch the power around an incident. Under the upgraded system this will happen automatically, which means we can locate, isolate and start managing an incident within a minute,” Endeavour Energy’s Manager System Operations, Robert Armstrong, told the Post.
Mr Armstrong and his team have recently met with Bilpin residents and explained how the system will benefit the power network in an area which bore the brunt of bushfires in the Hawkesbury this time last year.
Endeavour Energy work to restore power
“Bilpin did it extremely tough last summer and Endeavour Energy is pleased to work with the community to improve community safety and network resilience not just for bushfire emergencies but also for a thriving village life. Endeavour Energy was very glad to have an opportunity to meet with the Bilpin Region Advancement Group (BRAG) in Bilpin to discuss network resilience and reliability,” Mr Armstrong said.
“At Bilpin, electrical incidents that occur up and down the range, near Kurrajong for example, will be much less likely to disrupt power supply along the Bells Line of Road, including supply up to Bilpin. Not only will outage sizes be minimised, but our responses will be significantly faster under the upgraded system. We are upgrading our network automation system to enable Endeavour Energy to locate and isolate faults in a much more targeted way, significantly minimising outages,” Mr Armstrong said.
“This is a network-wide upgrade, which means all communities across the Hawkesbury will benefit from this investment in the modernisation of the network.”
Endeavour Energy has also released a Simple Steps for a Safer Summer campaign to help their customers take simple steps to help protect themselves, their families and their power supply. Find out more at www.endeavourenergy.com.au/safersummer.