Engineering Consultancy Frazer-Nash has developed a new way for South Australia’s principal electricity network, ElectraNet, to accurately detect transmission line-sag to ensure better public safety and enable greater efficiencies across the network.

ElectraNet owns and operates more than 5,600km of transmission lines in South Australia and the innovative micro-climate modelling tool, developed by Frazer-Nash, is causing great interest across the industry.

PowerMET earned Frazer-Nash their third successive challenge champions win in the Gravity Challenge, a competition organised by Deloitte to find solutions to industrial, social and environmental problems.

Frazer-Nash Group leader asset performance Nigel Doyle says: “To maximise the safe use of its assets ElectraNet needed to accurately predict line-sag across South Australia. Our solution provides localised weather conditions, enabling accurate calculations of the sag for each 400m span over the entire network.

“It offers ElectraNet a pathway to reducing weather station investment costs and enables greater flexibility for its renewable energy exports from South Australia to the other states. Frazer-Nash is looking forward to working with ElectraNet to take this work into the scale phase, to potentially roll it out across the entire South Australian transmission network.”

The Frazer-Nash Gravity Challenge team, consisting of Nigel Doyle, Andrejs Jaudzems, Rita Arrigo and Simon Inverarity, with support and guidance from Anthony Kwong, submitted its PowerMET tool at the start of June, and was selected by ElectraNet to demonstrate its microclimate modelling solution.