We’re committed to ensuring our networks are reliable for our customers and resilient to weather events, climate change and cyber threats. Read about our progress and goals for Pou whirinaki below.

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Explore what we’ve been working on to keep our networks reliable and resilient for our customers. 

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  • Ensuring reliable and resilient networks

    Goals and targets

    Here’s what we want to achieve for Pou whirinaki over the short, medium and long-term.

    Goals and targets FY25

    • Resilience to climate change - Undertake site and feasibility assessments to determine the impact of assets identified as vulnerable to physical climate risks and prioritise according to our decision-making framework/investment tool.  
    • Cyber risk management - Maintaining our independent certification under the ISO 27001 Information Security management standard.
    • Reliable energy supply - Keep our customers’ power on for an average of 99.95% of the time.
    • Resilience to climate change - Publication of our first Climate Related Disclosure, and our Climate Adaptation and Resilience plan.  
    • Resilience to disaster - Collaboration with other key infrastructure operators to identify interdependencies for resilience to disaster events. 
    • Reliable energy supply - Deliver energy security to gas customers by keeping gas flowing 99.99% of the time.  
    • Resilience to disaster - Complete regionally based scenario assessments to test our proposed likely response capabilities for critical customers during high impact, low probability events.  Develop community acceptable response targets and where appropriate, improvement plans. 
    • Reliable energy supply - Implementation of our Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) to support the reliability and resilience of supply. 

  • Ensuring reliable and resilient networks

    What we've done FY24

    We've been making progress towards our Pou whirinaki goals and targets. Here's what we worked on between 1 April 2023 - 31 March 2024.

    What we've done FY24

    • Powerco's Energy Resilience Strategy was completed and published internally.  Supporting roadmaps, success measures and roles and responsibilities for delivery are under development.
    • We implemented a refreshed enterprise risk management framework through the delivery of 11 risk deep dives, aligned to our four strategic priorities and assessed in a consistent manner using enviornmental, social, governance and operational risk criteria.  This provided a modern approach to risk, aligned with our strategy processes and integrated across the business. 
    • An external assessment was conducted to identify differing requirements between the 2013 and 2022 revisions of the ISO-27001 standard and to pinpoint any potential gaps in Powerco's Information Security Management System (ISMS). Any gaps have been integrated into the organisation's annual business planning process and are currently being addressed. Powerco is scheduled to undergo formal accreditation against the latest ISO 27001:2022 standard during FY25.
    • During FY24, our electricity customers' power was on for an average of 99.97% of the time. 
    • Powerco’s climate change scenarios and the initial outputs of physical risk analysis have been included in our 2024 Electricity AMP and 2023 Gas AMP.  Our first Climate Adaptation and Resilience plan will be published during FY25. Work is underway to determine how to value resilience through our electricity value framework, and embedded into our gas asset management decision framework.  We have also set up working groups in planning/design on our network hardening initiatives.
    • Gas flow to customers in FY24 was maintained for 99.9999 % of the time.
    • Our leakage target of less than 100 pipe leaks per 1,000km was achieved with 95 leaks in FY24.
    • Our first round of gas leak detection was undertaken from April 2024.  

     

    • We are planning for the gas network to be fully surveyed using the gas leakage vehicle by the end of Q3 FY25.  This will enable us to set a baseline for emissions reductions.
    • Initial resilience measures have been developed, setting a baseline for further community consultation and refinement.  Building on work undertaken with Lifelines groups (Waikato, Manawatu-Whanganui, Wairarapa etc.) so that cross-sector understanding of interdependencies can feed back into our network investment.
    • Progress has continued on the implementation of phase one of the Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) programme.  This includes work on:
      - deploying eMap – an updated full graphical visualisation of the network for operations
      - switch order management (process automation of network switching), and 
      - distribution power flow (improved operational visibility of voltages and power flows). 
      Testing and user acceptance is to begin in early FY25, with go-live expected later in the financial year.

  • Ensuring reliable and resilient networks

    What we've done FY23

    We've been making progress towards our Pou whirinaki goals and targets. Here's what we worked on between 1 April 2022 - 31 March 2023.

    What we’ve done FY23

    • A new enterprise-wide Risk Management Policy and Framework has been developed that provides a priority-based approach to identify, assess and address environmental, social, governance and operational-related risks.
    • Powerco has maintained its cyber security maturity at a level that is resilient against most cyber threats and is well-prepared to respond in the event of an incident. The focus for FY23 was improving staff awareness of external cyber threats.
    • Material climate data such as coastal erosion, coastal inundation, and flooding layers have been uploaded into Powerco's GIS platform. 
    • Due to the major events such as Cyclone Gabrielle, the target to keep our customers' power on for an average of 99.95% of the time was not met. However normalising for major events we achieved 99.96%.
    • Our reporting for storm resilience improved during FY23, and included impact of weather events and windspeed on our network resilience.  Further reporting improvements are planned for FY24. 
    • More than 500 low voltage monitors were installed during FY23. The information provided by these monitors was used to create a Distributed Generation hosting capacity map that indicates potential capacity for EV charging stations and other distributed energy oppportunities.
    • We delivered gas to our customers 99.99986% of the time.
    • During FY23 we detected and fixed 65.65 leaks per 1000kms.  This is within our target of <100 pipe leaks per 1,000km per annum.
    • The Marcogaz model was established to determine specific gas loss (and emissions) using historic gas leak data. The next step is to use the model to track and report on leakage every 3 months.
     

     

    • The FY23 Asset Management Plan (AMP) includes network resilience planning, based on physical risk work undertaken in 2020. This will be further updated with the development of an adaptation and resilience plan, for inclusion in the 2024 AMP.
    • Climate scenarios have been established and integrated into business planning. FY24 will focus on physical risk analysis and the development of an adaption and resilience strategy.
     

Keeping trees away to keep lights on

Our target: manage over 7,472 tree sites between January and September 2021.

Our mahi: we love trees - but not in overhead lines where they can cause outages. We managed over 14,300 tree sites to help ensure the lights stayed on for our customers.

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The pillars of our work