Summer readiness program has northern Australian operations ready for extreme weather scenarios

With the Summer wet season taking effect, teams at our northern Australian operations and Global Control Centre in Brisbane have put the finishing touches on an advance readiness program to prepare for the impacts that peak electricity demands and extreme weather events can have on our power stations.

EDL operations supply power to numerous remote communities and mining operations across northern Australia, where the extreme heat and unpredictable weather conditions present significant challenges to maintaining power supply.

In January 2023, the West Kimberley region experienced the worst flooding in Western Australia’s recent history, with the one in 100-year event cutting roads and damaging transport infrastructure and inundating and isolating the townships for over a month.

Pictured are some of our LNG tankers travelling on the flooded North West Coastal Highway under an essential services permit.

Teams from all areas of EDL’s Australian business worked tirelessly to keep power supplied to communities, with a massive technical, logistical and resourcing exercise required to incorporate temporary diesel generation and stores at our existing gas-fired power stations, which were cut off from liquified natural gas (LNG) re-supply.

Geoff Hobley, General Manager Remote Energy, said that in preparation for the wet season, operations teams had spent the cooler months working to minimize the risk of supply interruption by overhauling power generation assets and installing additional supplementary generation capacity to manage increased consumer load.

In addition, Lindsay Hassett, Global Control Centre Manager, has led our operations and Global Control Centre through exercises to practice responding to ‘outage scenarios’ most likely to be triggered by extreme weather events.

Geoff said quantities of the LNG used to run the remote power stations were being closely monitored to ensure sufficient reserves were kept on hand in case regular road-supply routes were cut.

Check that your cyclone preparation kit is up to date. For more information visit: Prepare for a cyclone – Department of Fire and Emergency Services (dfes.wa.gov.au)