Newcrest Lihir’s Power & Utilities Electrical and Engineering team has successfully completed a major system upgrade that has seen a significant reduction in power outage across the Lihir operation and surrounding communities.
Senior Electrical Engineer Essau Kelep, Senior Control System Engineer Raniel Endrino and Graduate Electrical Engineer Keff Jerim led the system upgrade that saw the rollout of the new Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) to Short Message System (SMS) with the aim to reduce power outage and response time.
This project reflects Newcrest’s Operating Performance pillar in safely managing and operating business assets to reach their full potential.
“Not all power outages can be prevented, but this new system gives us an upper hand. We are now able to provide a more reliable electricity service to the operation and nearby communities. In delivering this project, the team displayed Newcrest values of Working Together, High Performance and Innovation and Problem Solving,” said Senior Power Systems Engineer Peter Zajac.
The broad scope of the project required the team to integrate a mobile alarm notification and distribution software called WIN-911 into SCADA’s existing communications system. This enabled SCADA power outage alerts—previously delivered to desktop computers—to be rerouted and directly relayed to mobile phones via SMS.
“With the previous system, we were notified of power outage alerts via desktop computers. If we were out in the field and there was a power blackout somewhere, we had no way of knowing unless we had access to a computer or someone called to notify us. With the new system, SMS alerts are sent directly to our mobile phones wherever we are,” said Kelep.
Newcrest Lihir values innovation and problem solving and encourages its people, mostly Papua New Guineans and Lihirians to have an owner’s mindset in finding new ways to solve problems at their workplaces, homes, and communities.
Source: Newcrest Mining Limited – Lihir
