Future resilience through digital twins

“The data-sharing aspect of Digital Twin cityscapes, precincts and countries can be used to plan for, prevent and support recovery from natural disasters and climate change.”¹

At this year’s Energy Networks Australia (ENA) awards, the top prize for innovation went to Endeavour Energy for its digital twin technology that was put to the test during extreme periodic flooding of the Hawkesbury River in NSW between March 2021 and July 2022.

In basic terms, a digital twin is a virtual model of an actual physical object, process or system. It integrates and synchronises a variety of data, eg, real-time and historical satellite imagery, weather patterns and elevation measurements, in order to simulate and thus gain dynamic, detailed insight into a real-world system, enabling decisive, strategic action — something that’s of obvious value in the context of disaster mitigation.

During an ENA webinar showcasing the Innovation Award finalists, Dominic Adams, GM Networks, Energy Networks Australia (ENA), who was on the judging panel for the award, said this sort of innovation was becoming business-as-usual for energy companies in a changing landscape involving the mass rollout of SAPS (standalone power systems), businesses becoming more data-centric in preparation for DER (distributed energy resources) integration and an increasing response to customer needs around climate change resilience.

Endeavour Energy’s Edmund Li reiterated this during the webinar: “Endeavour Energy’s franchise area covers 24½ thousand km² of New South Wales, and we’ve got a very diverse geographic climate and environment. We’ve got 80% of the area that’s considered bushfire-prone and we cover 160 km of the east coast coastline.

“That’s really prompted us to rethink how we build, operate and maintain a network that’s resilient to climate change, and like most businesses across the world we’re already seeing those impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on a more frequent basis.

“When disaster does strike, we’ve been rethinking how we can use insights from tools like the digital twin to enable us to better communicate with our customers and coordinate our recovery methods.”

Endeavour Energy used software company Neara’s platform to deliver a structural digital twin that was able to perform “complex engineering-grade analysis, automatically, at a whole-of-network scale”. The Neara platform enabled the company to combine a variety of different data sources, including GIES (Geospatial Information Extraction Services), asset-management data, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and geographical/environmental information.

When the worst flooding in 30 years struck the Hawkesbury in March 2021, Endeavour decided to put the digital twin to the test, by gathering information on how the flood was affecting Endeavour’s customers and assets in near real time.

Digital twin in action

Initially, an incident management team was set up to organise the response. Such a team typically conducts on-the-ground inspections to find out what assets have been affected, but when floodwaters affect accessibility, the recovery process becomes complicated and prolonged, as frontline workers need to regularly assess whether they can access sites to scope the damage.

“This is where the digital twin came into the picture, as a means of improving emergency response and providing situational awareness to ensure the customers would be safe from the dangers of electricity during the flood,” said Endeavour Energy’s Lee Wiggins.

“Ingesting the digital elevation model, pre-computed flooding events from the NSW Government and real-time river height feeds from the Bureau of Meteorology, we were able to compute in near real time the flood extent across the Hawkesbury area and overlay this into the digital twin network.”

The model went through multiple iterations and its accuracy was confirmed through on-the-ground inspections and drone footage. This allowed the company to improve community safety by turning off power at parts of the network that would be too close to the floodwaters.

“As every flood is different, having the hyper-local awareness with scale meant that we were able to keep customers ‘on’ as long as we could, and that the control room didn’t have to necessarily act reactively on feedback on the ground to inform of differences between reality and the flood plans,” Wiggins said.

The digital twin also facilitated a better allocation of field resources and accelerated restoration time by narrowing down the scope of assets to be inspected by 80%.

What’s next for Endeavour?

“We’re looking to go further by using the digital twin to design a more flood-resilient network,” Wiggins said. “We’ve now designed and physically raised the height of the 33 kV feed going across the Windsor Bridge to withstand a 17 m AHD (Australian Height Datum) flood level. This means we can keep the lights on for 3000 customers up to a one-in-a-100-year flood level.”

Endeavour is also exploring the use of the digital twin for vegetation management and bushfire response.

A national perspective

How important will digital twins be in future disaster mitigation? Very important, if a recommendation by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) that the federal government create an Office of National Digital Twin² is taken up. While the AIIA’s nationally coordinated vision has not yet become a reality, the CSIRO and two state governments are forging ahead with ambitious digital twin initiatives.

NSW Spatial Digital Twin

Launched March 2020, and the largest 3D modelling project ever undertaken at the time³, the NSW Spatial Digital Twin was built by CSIRO’s digital research network Data61, in partnership with the NSW Department of Customer Service’s (DCS) Spatial Services. It is designed for many uses, including disaster planning, recovery and prevention. Following the NSW Independent Bushfire Inquiry on the 2019/2020 bushfires, which emphasised a critical lack of telecommunications and utility infrastructure data (especially spatial data), DCS Spatial services is developing a dataset of Government Radio Network (GRN) telecommunications towers and assets across NSW to assist with emergency management and response.

Spark Operational

Also developed by Data61, this time in partnership with AFAC, the National Council for Fire and Emergency Services, Spark Operational is an extension of the CSIRO’s bushfire-modelling tool Spark, which dates back to 2015. Designed to be user-friendly and adaptable to different locations and circumstances, Spark Operational aims to provide a nationally consistent bushfire modelling and prediction capability, with the potential to be used by emergency services overseas. With phase 1 of its implementation having begun in 2021, it is intended to be fully operational by 2024.

Digital Twin Victoria

Incorporating seven streams of work, including Enhanced Disaster Response, the Victorian Government’s digital twin “aims to create Victoria online” with $37.4m invested over four years. The disaster response stream applies machine learning to Vicmap Imagery — a statewide resource of aerial photography spanning many decades — in order to address complex environmental data problems and build “a proof of concept of a Routable Vicmap dataset designed to improve outcomes for bushfire and emergency response”.

Along with Endeavour’s digital twin, these initiatives indicate DTs have a vital part to play in Australian disaster mitigation. For the AIIA, however, the long-term success of DT technology lies in a national DT ecosystem where data-sharing is paramount — subject to appropriate security rules and authorisation processes — ensuring clear, consistent standards, better coordination and the avoidance of siloed data.

^{1. CSIRO website, https://data6csiro.au/en/Our-Research/Our-Work/Future-Cities/NSW-Digital-Twin}

^{2. https://www.govtechreview.com.au/content/gov-digital/news/digital-can-help-reduce-natural-disaster-impact-aiia-49890182}

^{3. Australian Information Industry Association, ‘Growing Globally Competitive Industries’, https://aiia.com.au/, 2021.}

^{Image credit: iStock.com/metamorworks}