Our energy system must fundamentally transform to enable society’s equitable transition to a low carbon, resilient future. Our increasing reliance on renewable electricity generation, the growth of distributed energy resources, and increasing value of demand side flexibility creates new opportunities for customer participation and community resilience.
Local electricity distribution businesses (EDBs), such as Orion, play a critical role in enabling the transition - connecting customers across our region and facilitating efficient operation of the local system for the benefit of consumers.
We must explore, learn and innovate together – as EDBs, as an energy sector, and as a region to co-create the energy future our community seeks. We invite our customers, communities, partners and stakeholders to join us on this innovation journey.
Innovation strategy
Innovation is critical to meet the complex challenges facing the energy sector. The Orion Innovation Strategy will enable a portfolio of exploration to accelerate the pace of change.
Innovation is needed to adapt to the changing landscape of the electricity sector and take advantage of exciting opportunities that improve outcomes for consumers.
Below are examples of innovation projects that Orion is involved in.
Our Innovation Strategy contains some innovation project case studies and list of innovation projects at various stages.
Advanced drone technology
Orion has explored how advanced technology and drones can expedite the detection and diagnosis of faults during power outages. By using thermal imaging and live streaming capabilities, faults can now be identified significantly faster, reducing outage durations, and improving operational safety.
Orion has collaborated with other distribution networks to share and scale the benefits of this technology across the industry.
Automatic power restoration
To restore power to our communities quickly following a fault, an Automatic Power Restoration System (APRS) has been developed. The APRS leverages the power of remote switches with a restoration algorithm that significantly reduces outage times.
As the first EDB in the country to test this technology, our objective is to move from testing the system to full control.
EEA FlexTalk
FlexTalk, led by the EEA(external link), is a collaborative industry initiative to evaluate the processes that need to be in place to apply the OpenADR communication protocol to achieve active managed charging of EVs, enabling flexibility in New Zealand.
Orion is a funding and delivery partner and has been part of the Project Design Team from the early stage.
Home Energy Living Lab
Orion is developing a Home Energy Living Lab to better understand the implications of changing household energy profiles and knowledge needs of our residential customers, and trial products or services that support the low-carbon energy transition. As we gather insights and learnings, we are exploring expanding the project in collaboration with partners.
Lincoln Flexibility
The situation
Lincoln is seeing large scale residential growth, which is raising the demand for electricity in the area. Traditionally that growth in demand would require more electricity network to be built, however by utilising batteries already in the community, Orion is looking to reduce network demand at key times, for instance winter morning or evening peaks.
Flexibility support from batteries will be used to reduce peak electricity demand in the area in 2024 and 2025 and could also potentially be used to lessen the impact of an outage in the area.
What we explored
Orion went through a competitive procurement process to seek an alternative solution to traditional network build that could reduce peak demand in the area and chose to partner with Ecotricity as the flexibility service provider. Ecotricity’s proposal involves a primarily residential-based battery solution.
Desired outcomes
Lincoln Flex is part of other projects in Orion’s flexibility and markets development programme to maximise customer participation and support decarbonisation at lowest cost. These flexibility-related innovation trials are providing valuable insight and evidence on the effectiveness of different solutions, including which ones to scale and where there are opportunities for further exploration.
For Lincoln, a solution to communicate with Ecotricity and dispatch the flexibility service was implemented for winter 2024, with the objective to further scale for winter 2025. This solution is embedded within Orion’s operations systems, enabling us to trial new functions and ways of working. The Lincoln Flex project is helping us understand how to work with other providers to integrate and scale non-network solutions, unlocking the system-wide value of flexibility.
Resi-Flex is a collaborative project from Orion and Wellington Electricity, aiming to incentivise flexibility from residential consumers by exploring commercial mechanisms in collaboration with flexibility stakeholders.
ViSION is an initiative to better understand the Orion low voltage network, which was originally designed for one-way power flow. With the rise of solar energy and electric vehicles, two-way power flow is now necessary.
Orion collaborates with various partners in our community, the energy sector, and with entrepreneurs and industry to innovate towards powering a cleaner and brighter future.
Ara Ake EDB Decarbonisation Challenge
Orion collaborated with seven other EDBs and Ara Ake to select three challenge winners, and are running pilots with two innovators:
Established by Orion to address complex energy system innovation, locally focused in Canterbury and nationally relevant in terms of collaboration and learning.
The first challenge area has brought 20 organisations together and identified six opportunities to collaborate towards an equitable energy transition in mid-Canterbury, including shared insights, on local household energy hardship interventions.
Electricity Networks Aotearoa Future Networks Forum
Orion co-chairs the ENA’s Future Network Forum which has workstreams on outreach, strategy, and collaborative solutions. This involves co-ordinating with EDBs, the EEA, retailers, flexibility providers, DG investors, Transpower and other stakeholders to develop aligned solutions that work for the whole system.
Flex Forum
The FlexForum(external link) is a cross industry group formed to identify a set of actions to integrate distributed energy resources (DER) into the electricity system and markets to maximise the benefits for Aotearoa New Zealand.
As a member of the FlexForum, Orion are supporting coordination and collaborative action to enable a smart and flexible energy system.
Orion Energy Accelerator
Powered by Orion Group and Ministry of Awesome, the Orion Energy Accelerator(external link) supports high impact energy innovations that will help New Zealand move towards a carbon neutral future.
This successful collaboration is also supported by Callaghan Innovation and Ara Ake.
