Working Together to Unlock Grid Resilience
A new consortium to strengthen the resilience and reliability of New Zealand’s electric grid
Editor's Note: This post was originally published on the Tapestry blog.
Today, we’re announcing a collaboration that embodies the spirit of Tapestry: we are joining forces with a consortium of four of New Zealand’s largest Energy Distribution Businesses (EDBs) to help improve reliability and reduce outages for electricity customers, using AI as a catalyst.
This consortium —the first of its kind in New Zealand— includes Northpower, The Orion Group, Unison Networks and WEL Networks. Collectively, consortium members deliver energy to more than 510,000 customers across the North Island and South Island—more than 25% of all electricity customers nationwide. These partners are deploying GridAware, Tapestry’s grid management and intelligence platform, to transform the process of inspecting and maintaining equipment, leveraging drones and AI to handle inspections faster and more efficiently and gain new insights into the grids they operate.
In the near-term, this will enable consortium members to more quickly identify equipment that may be defective or nearing its end of life, which can help avoid electrical outages or other potential problems. Over time, those insights could also be promising in improving long-term planning and real-time performance – all for the benefit of New Zealand’s electricity customers.
This consortium —the first of its kind in New Zealand— includes Northpower, The Orion Group, Unison Networks and WEL Networks.
Smarter grids through shared insights
The consortium was formed in the spirit of mahi tahi — the Māori term for collaboration.
New Zealand’s 29 electricity distribution companies maintain more than 150,000 kilometres of power lines that carry electricity to homes and businesses. That larger grid contains a wide range of different types of assets; each EDB may use different lines, poles, transformers, insulators, and cross-arms across its portion of the grid, and may have only a small number of certain types of assets in the territory it serves.
That sheer variety makes it challenging for any individual EDB to teach an algorithm to identify an asset and correctly assess its condition, because algorithms require a very high volume of training data to learn from– and on its own, a single EDB may not have enough imagery to effectively accomplish the job.
By pooling their data, the hope is that members of this consortium will be able to reduce outages in the communities they serve. Field experts for each EDB will use GridAware to label thousands of examples of different types of assets and potential equipment defects. Collectively, the EDBs aim to contribute more than 10,000 labeled images identifying 10 unique types of grid assets over the next two years.
This collaboration will digitally teach Tapestry’s software how to recognize maintenance needs for equipment used across the entire consortium. As members contribute even more images, Tapestry’s tools will offer richer insights to the members so they can more quickly and effectively maintain their grids. We hope other EDBs will join this effort.
Building on our work with Vector
This new partnership builds directly on Tapestry’s ongoing collaboration with Vector, New Zealand’s largest EDB, to demonstrate how tools like AI, computer vision, and machine learning can transform grid management, maintenance and planning.
Combined, Vector and these four new partners serve more than half of all electricity customers in New Zealand. We’re proud that our AI-powered tools are helping strengthen the infrastructure that delivers power to a majority of homes and businesses nationwide.
Vector, which serves 1.8 million people in and around the Auckland area, has been using Tapestry’s tools to reduce inspection times and boost resilience, ensuring that electricity flows to consumers and businesses with as few interruptions as possible. In August, Vector released data showing that GridAware has enabled field assessment technicians to inspect its roadside utility poles more than 5x faster; inspections that once took 30 to 45 minutes per pole can now be accomplished in just 5 to 7 minutes.
We hope that this consortium will enable Tapestry to have a similarly positive impact across the rest of New Zealand.
An interconnected future
The consortium’s contributions will help provide a highly-accurate baseline of New Zealand’s distribution grid. We hope that by sharing this collective grid intelligence through a unified platform, Tapestry can help the country’s entire grid grow stronger and more resilient in the years to come—while keeping prices affordable for electricity customers.
If you’re interested in collaborating with Tapestry, or joining our team, please don’t hesitate to reach out.