19 August 2022
From sitting out on yingina / Great Lake, to the penstocks at Poatina, to the side of Cethana Dam – we access parts of our state to sustainably manage both our hydropower assets and our amazing Tasmanian environments.
Luckily for us, technology has come in handy over the years to make our jobs easier, so we can save time and effort – and keep out of some tight situations!
Here are five cool ways we use technology in our day-to-day.
Our water quality monitoring program collects samples from each catchment area during the year to keep our lakes clean and healthy for our native species. The surface water required to measure parameters like water temperature, dissolved oxygen and turbidity needs to be collected a certain distance from the lake’s shore, which typically requires two employees and a boat.
Water is pumped into a vessel that hangs off the drone, flown by our master drone pilot (or otherwise known as Environmental Scientist), Andy Taylor.
Carrying out this monitoring more efficiently means we can focus on monitoring changes and adapt quickly.
With a web of civil infrastructure winding its way between our power stations and lakes, there are bound to be tunnels and pipes that are too tight for people to fit in. Enter the Deep Trekker, or “Pipe Crawler”, another invaluable new member of our team. The civil engineering team have brought the Pipe Crawler into their routine inspections to improve both efficiency and safety.
It has a range of up to 400m and can work under water as well, making it a handy tool to have while inspecting all types of civil infrastructure including dams and canals.
In some of Tasmania’s most remote areas, we often find our dams end up with unwanted attention from weeds. Being so close to our waterways, weeds can spread easily downstream and impact our native species, and even weaken the structural integrity of dam walls.
To manage this in the past, we would need to use a small aircraft, helicopter, or abseil to get to these hard-to-reach locations.
Image: Taz Drone Solutions
In 2020, we teamed up with our friends at Taz Drone Solutions to identify problem-weed-areas at Cethana Dam.
Our contract with Taz Drone Solutions has been implemented into our routine weed management program, making it a much safer and quicker job to keep our dams looking spick and span.
When it’s raining, the people of Hydro are happy!
We keep a keen eye on the weather forecasts, (and other measures), to make complex decisions on how best to manage our storages and balance our energy portfolio.
To tell how much it’s raining across every corner of Tasmania, we use a traditional but reliable method. A rain gauge is a meteorological instrument used to measure rainfall over a given amount of time.
These measurements are transmitted electronically via the Bureau of Meteorology to us, and other users like Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania. The information is also publicly available here, or on our water map here.
The network of rain gauges across the state makes it easy for us to quickly confirm rainfall in real-time, and make any adjustments to our operations based on weather changes– not an unusual for us in Tasmania (“like four seasons in one day…”)
Read our commenting guidelines
If life begins at 40, as the saying goes, it began this year for one of our most iconic landmarks. But clocking up four decades of dedicated power generation for Tasmania had taken a toll so this year Gordon Power Station has undergone one of its biggest maintenance operations yet.
Geotechnical investigations is the technical term for poking around in the ground to find out more about the soil, sub-surface structure and the rock layers beneath. And it’s ground breaking stuff… literally!
The Bass Strait islands are powered by world leading renewable microgrid technology. But just how do they work? Like any good explanation, let's start with a film analogy...