Project information
Project overview
The purpose of this project is to collaborate with EA Technology and other lines companies to evaluate a new asset monitoring technology (VisNet Hub monitors) and predictive models, on a variety of cable assets and geographic conditions throughout New Zealand. This project will allow lines companies to evaluate both the technical solution, and its ability to deliver financial and quality benefits to consumers, and to share collective insights and learnings in the following areas:
- detect and trend pre-fault activity to prevent cable failures before they occur
- identify correlations between degradation, environmental conditions, and manufacturer
- improve asset-health forecasting and renewal-planning accuracy
- benchmark low voltage network performance and reliability against national peers
- gain broader visibility into harmonics, capacity, and DER-driven load impacts.
Innovation challenge or opportunity
Due to the historical uptake of undergrounding New Zealand's network — and as outlined in an EEA paper titled LV cable renewal forecasting:
how near is the wall of wire? — it's understood there will be a new requirement to renew low voltage cables at rates we have never done before.
This technology aims to demonstrate the value of using high-speed logging to capture 'prefault' waveforms of low voltage cables and using Large Language Models (LLM), classify the cable into failure categories, allowing a targeted approach that addresses the conditional need more so than just traditional age-based assumptions.
The goal is to reduce unnecessary spend and interruptions whilst increasing long-term reliability and customer satisfaction.
Desired outcomes and customer benefits
Business outcomes include:
- detects and trends pre-fault activity, enabling proactive maintenance and preventing cable failures before they occur, reducing outages and customer disruptions.
- real-time monitoring and rapid fault location minimise outage duration, with UK deployments showing up to 120-minute reductions in outage times per low voltage fault.
- potentially reduce outages as a result of cable failure or increasing thermal and loading stress linked to increased use of DER.
- reduction of unplanned service interruptions (faster restoration)
- minimises unnecessary excavations and enables targeted repairs, optimised low voltage reinforcement investments and operational resource allocation
- reduction of OPEX and optimising CAPEX through planned interventions.
Customer benefits include:
- improved reliability and reduced downtime
- better affordability due to reduced operational costs.
Progress made
As of 14 August 2026, 21 of the 40 locations have been installed and are loaded and reporting data. These 21 sites cover 91 low voltage feeders and approximately 1800 ICP's. Three low voltage feeders show 'pre fault' indicators. With one listed as failure imminent which may require attention in the next six months
Low voltage network models are being sent to the Electricity Authority to allow them to demonstrate their impedance distance to fault function to give a location with a margin of error of the possible fault location.
