Western Power has awarded Fugro a contract valued at more than AUD 5 million to capture data and undertake modeling of its electricity assets. The company is a Western Australian State Government-owned corporation with a vast transmission and distribution network and is directly responsible for managing the physical network including its poles, wires, substations and other infrastructure.
Under the contract, Fugro will capture engineering-quality data of Western Power’s complete 75,000-km overhead network and will host the data on its cloud-based Roames platform. Roames combines remote sensing technologies with cloud computing and machine learning algorithms to deliver a complete and accurate, real-world, digital twin of a power company’s assets.
The data captured by Fugro will provide asset and vegetation analytics and desktop scoping opportunities and solutions, helping Western Power to deliver a number of asset management programs. Another important part of the project is to match all surveyed assets with Western Power’s geographical information system (GIS), removing ambiguities in spatial information. In combination with Roames, the information forms an enabling platform for developing and implementing advanced digital and analytical decision support tools for asset management that can help drive business efficiencies.
Jared Baronian, Fugro’s Manager Power Asia-Pacific, welcomed Western Power to the fast-growing group of global utility providers using the Roames platform for virtual world asset management.
“Fugro monitors well over two million spans of network on a yearly cycle in Australia, Europe and the USA, through the Roames platform,” he said. “This latest contract demonstrates our continuing focus on developing asset management solutions to help utility companies reduce operational costs and improve safety and customer service.”
