Russell Beatty, Muhammad Hameed, Linda Brunet, Mark Pearse, Christian Urich, Hetal Parmar
The scheduling of dam safety investment is an important part of asset lifecycle management and dam safety management. It involves a critical balancing act between the need to take reasonable steps to safeguard the community and water users from the consequences of dam failure and the cost impacts that result from investment.
The focus of this paper will be to outline approaches for 1) designing different investment scenarios using network linear programming (NLP), 2) assessing the impact of different investment scenarios on risk profiles, the level of uncertainty and costs to customers, 3) benchmarking the planned levels of investment against that of other dam portfolio owners across Australia, 4) developing a coherent narrative concerning the planned level and rate of dam safety investment that takes account of community and customer needs.
Several hundred risk control measures and associated investigations identified in previous SFAIRP screening assessment and prioritisation studies were analysed, and ongoing refinements to project estimates are nearing completion.
The bespoke scheduling and financial modelling tools enable rapid assessment of impact of different investment scenarios on both costs to customers and dam safety risk. This approach has provided new insights into the relationship between investment and dam safety and risk outcomes across the WaterNSW dams portfolio including valley by valley and rural versus urban investment.
This work demonstrates that dam safety investment can be approached in a systematic way by employing tools that allow rapid generation and assessment of different investment scenarios. The ability to evaluate a number of different options adds important weight to the credibility of any proposed strategy and is particularly important as an input to the economic regulation pricing review process. By demonstrating a systematic and robust options evaluation approach with a clear focus on outcomes for customers, the community and dam safety risks, the case for the prudency and efficiency of the planned investments can be made.
$15.00
ANCOLD is an incorporated voluntary association of organisations and individual professionals with an interest in dams in Australia.
System maintenance will be performed on the servers that host the ANCOLD Digital Guidelines, on Saturday, December 21st @ 10:00 PM AEDT which will require the servers to reboot.
Total downtime during that event could be up to 4 hours and will commence sharply at 10 pm AEDT. During that time end users will not be able to view or access their secured content.