Amidst record investment in renewables, getting the most value from Australia’s green energy infrastructure relies on effective work and asset management.
Learn how utilities can embrace a data-driven approach and allow their investments to benefit their communities for years to come.
Wind and solar reach new heights
Australia’s energy transition is well underway. Investment in large-scale renewables reached a new high of $9 billion in 2024. This contributed to a 13 per cent jump in wind generation year-upon-year, from 2015–2025, while solar leapt an astonishing 2777 per cent in the same decade.
Two key forces are driving Australia’s rapid renewables rollout. One is rising energy demand, fuelled by population growth, economic expansion, and electrification. The other is the country’s ambitious decarbonisation goal to source 82 per cent of its electricity from renewables by 2030. More energy is needed, and renewables may be one way to boost supply.
The result is the largest shakeup of Australia’s energy system since the 1950s. Backed by government initiatives such as the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) and Rewiring the Nation, the Federal Government is sponsoring grid modernisation and expansion projects to help make clean energy more accessible.
Effective work and asset management can help Australian utilities get the most value from this infrastructure investment.
Control costs, curb disruption
Assets are the backbone of utility operations. They are the physical infrastructure used to generate and transmit power, ranging from solar panels and wind turbines to substations and distribution lines.
The effective management of these crucial assets is a cornerstone of operational success, helping utilities achieve two core imperatives. These relate to service and finance:
The service imperative is to provide the safe, reliable power that customers expect to meet their energy needs.
How does asset management support this? Continually monitoring and analysing assets’ health and performance helps utilities operate renewable energy systems at their highest efficiency, helping reduce outages and increase energy output.
The financial imperative is about protecting both the affordability of services for customers and the utility’s own financial viability. Preventive asset maintenance helps to preserve assets’ long-term health and performance, reducing unnecessary costs.
For example, an effective maintenance and management approach can extend a wind turbine’s lifespan beyond the expected 20–25 years, reducing the turbine’s total cost of ownership, resulting in better value for the utility and a lower cost-to-serve to pass on to customers through their bills.
Unfortunately, a common barrier for utilities is the accuracy, completeness, and availability of their asset data.
Barriers to best practice
Effective work and asset management relies on knowing what needs to be done, when, and what the likely impact will be. The more data utilities have about their assets’ history, performance, and criticality, the better they can plan and prioritise work and investment to meet their operational and financial objectives.
Unfortunately, poor quality and visibility of data often get in the way.
Utilities often report scenarios where reactive work is being performed on assets, followed soon after by proactive scheduled maintenance.
This is a double blow for the utility. Not only are they wasting valuable time and resources to attend an asset twice in short order, but – more alarmingly – it indicates the inability to extract value from data and turn one visit into a “pre-emptive” maintenance action that avoids supply interruption, equipment replacement costs, and wasted labour effort.
The root cause often relates to how many teams make decisions about an asset at different points in its lifecycle. These teams can include accounting, field workers, load planning, procurement, project management, regulatory, legal, and more.
Different people, processes, and technologies govern different stages and activities. If these teams work in disconnected ways using technology that is not integrated, asset data can become siloed, causing poor visibility.
Conversely, by connecting their asset data, utilities can unlock insights that help reduce costs and align maintenance and investment decisions with their organisational strategy.
Data-driven asset management
Data is the common thread across the asset lifecycle. It tells an asset’s life story: Its origins, where it has travelled, what it has accomplished, and who has maintained it. This provides insights into the asset’s health and how much it cost to design, construct, renovate, operate, and maintain.
Synchronising this data and storing it in a central place can help teams collaborate in real time and make proactive decisions based on relevant data from across the organisation. The foundation of this is to introduce a common data environment and a single platform to collect, manage, and disseminate the information needed at each stage of the asset lifecycle.
Paired with AI-powered analytics, utilities can access data insights not previously possible, such as automated forecasting and preventive maintenance generation, standardised and codified failure profiles from inspections, condition assessments, rectifications, and more.
Insights like these can help utilities make data-driven decisions to maximise performance and minimise assets’ total cost of ownership. Australian utilities using this approach are already achieving impressive outcomes.
Joining the dots
Taking an integrated, enterprise-wide approach to asset lifecycle management – with asset data and information flowing with the asset from one stage to the next – is key to maximising the value of Australia’s green energy investment.
What happens inside the utility impacts the world outside. Integrated systems, connected processes, and unified data can uphold the safety, reliability, and affordability of services for communities, while optimising the performance of Australia’s green energy system as part of the nation’s clean energy transition.
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