After careful deliberation, the shortlist for the 2020 Digital Utility Awards has been chosen. Congratulations and well done to all our finalists!
Now our illustrious industry judges have the hard task of choosing the winners, with this year’s judging panel comprising:
- Andrew Dillon, Chief Executive Officer, Energy Networks Australia
- Adam Lovell, Executive Director, Water Services Association of Australia
- Tony Martin, Oceania Advisory Leader, Energy Transition, EY
- Faye Griffiths, Managing Director, Resources Operating Group, Accenture
- Craig Mathisen, Chief Operations Officer, Water Industry Operators Association of Australia
- Sanj Perera, Asia Pacific Consulting Partner, Deloitte
The finalists, which have been listed in alphabetical order, are:
Best Customer Innovation
BidEnergy – for its use of robotic process automation to fully automate utility bill management.
Energy Queensland – for its online mapping application, Look Up and Live, that pinpoints the location of electrical assets across Queensland to help improve safety around powerlines.
Hunter Water – for its Water Usage Calculator, which allows users to answer questions about how they are using water in their household and provides a personalised water usage breakdown, along with relevant water saving tips.
Jemena – for its Customer Journeys Program, which involved radically innovating digital solutions for three key steps in the process for customers connecting to gas or electricity.
Queensland Urban Utilities – for its adoption of a Virtual Assist platform, which allows a customer to live stream their mobile device’s camera and microphone by simply clicking a link sent by SMS from Queensland Urban Utilities.
United Energy – for its Network Fault Detection System, which analyses, in near real time, the data from smart meters to help identify potentially unsafe network connections that may result in electric shocks.
Water Corporation – for its online tool, Water Watchers, which is designed to help customers compare their water use with similar households based on four key factors: suburb, block size, number of people and bore use.
Best Use of New Technology
CitiPower, Powercor and United Energy – for its LiDAR Lab project, which will see all LiDAR services moved in-house by 2021 to improve quality, minimise risks, reduce works hours and reduce costs.
Endeavour Energy – for its use of geospatial analysis to understand the past, present and future vegetation risks on a bushfire-prone electricity network.
Jemena – for its cloud analytics platform, Jemena Amazon Web Services (JAWS), which combines a data lake, curated data sets that integrate together several data sources and re-usable machine learning applications.
Melbourne Water – for its use of Artificial Intelligence to automatically assess vegetation from images captured by drones.
SA Power Networks – for its grid of the future solution, which is leveraging an opportunity to offer an increased energy export limit, above the standard 5kW, without adversely impacting the low-voltage network.
SA Water – for its fresh approach to SCADA, which saw the replacement of its decentralised platform (system infrastructure located around the state) to a central, virtual solution across multiple secure data centres.
South East Water – for its Aquarevo residential development, which brings together a suite of innovative water and energy saving technologies that have not previously been incorporated in an urban residential context.
Water Corporation – for its H2OME study, combines digital metering data with household data on fixtures, fittings and appliance efficiency, attitudes, demographics, billing, marketing and communications with big data sets comprising weather, spatial, land and CSIRO photogrammetry data to understand the drivers of water use.
Digital Utility of the Year – Energy
Jemena
SA Power Networks
Western Power
Digital Utility of the Year – Water
Queensland Urban Utilities
South East Water
Utility Innovator of the Year
Cameron Dorse, Chief Digital Officer, Jemena
Russell Riding, Automation Team Leader, Melbourne Water
Tristan Bottrell, Manager Digital Projects, Water Corporation
Young Digital Leader of the Year
Gagneet Serai, Engineer, Data Scientist and Software Developer, Unitywater
Ian Harding, Remote and Mobile Technologies Specialist, Melbourne Water
Jesse Mills, Strategic Customer Innovation Lead, Jemena
Jiangxia Zhong, Data Analytics Engineer, Jemena
Raphael D’Almeida, Works Delivery Analyst, Unitywater
Roger Barnes, CEO, Billcap and Managing Director, SleevesUp
The winners will be announced and celebrated on Thursday 19 March at a Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony held as part of the Digital Utilities 2020 Conference.
Digital Utilities is a two-day event, taking place from 19-20 March 2020 in Sydney, that provides delegates with the tools to use digital technologies to accelerate and transform their organisations. Click here to secure your spot at Australia’s leading digital utility conference and expo.
