Endeavour Energy is one of Australia's largest electricity distribution networks, delivering power to 2.5 million people across a 24,000 sq km territory spanning a uniquely diverse mix of urban, semi-urban, and rural communities across New South Wales.

Client Story

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At a glance

nxzen is partnering with Endeavour Energy to transform the way its extensive network of overhead assets is inspected, monitored and managed. What began as a strategic consulting engagement has evolved into a 10-year co-development partnership, establishing the foundations for a more intelligent, resilient and future-ready network.

Key moments:

Replaced costly helicopter surveys with an annual LiDAR capture that extends visibility across Endeavour Energy's entire 24,000 sq km territory
Automated drones capture approximately 450k aerial images across 180,000 pole tops annually, improving positioning accuracy and increasing daily pole capture rates by 40%
Designed a purpose-built platform for high-speed pole-top image review that reduced program costs by approximately 25%
Created a shared Greater Sydney Digital Twin, allowing geospatial and risk data to be put to use by local transport, telecommunications, water utilities, and governing bodies

The challenge

Managing risk across a vast and complex network

Endeavour Energy operates one of Australia's largest electricity distribution networks, with approximately 85% of its network franchise located within designated bushfire-prone areas. Ensuring the safety, reliability and compliance of these assets is a critical responsibility, particularly in the lead-up to each bushfire season.

To meet regulatory requirements, Endeavour Energy conducts annual inspections of approximately 13,000 km of power lines and 160,000 pole tops. These inspections play a vital role in identifying potential defects and reducing bushfire risk across the network.

Historically, these inspections were undertaken using low-flying helicopters. While effective in meeting compliance obligations, the approach presented opportunities to improve operational efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and enhance safety outcomes. Helicopter inspections could also be affected by weather and scheduling constraints, while noise from low-altitude flights occasionally impacted rural communities and landowners.

In addition, inspections were primarily focused on bushfire-prone corridors, limiting visibility across other areas of the network. As a result, maintenance and vegetation management activities often relied on planned inspection cycles and historical information, rather than comprehensive, near real-time asset intelligence.

Recognising these challenges, Endeavour Energy sought a more innovative and scalable approach that would provide greater network visibility, support proactive decision-making, and strengthen its long-term asset management capabilities.

The partnership

From consultancy to co-development

Seeking a more efficient and scalable approach to its Pre-Summer Bushfire Program, Endeavour Energy set out to enhance the way vegetation hazards and pole-top defects were identified across its network. After seeing the success of nxzen's digital reality platform with TasNetworks, Endeavour Energy engaged nxzen to explore how emerging technologies and asset intelligence could transform its inspection program.

From the outset, the partnership has been built on a shared commitment to innovation, continuous improvement and delivering better outcomes for the network, communities and customers. Through regular strategic planning sessions, both organisations work closely to align priorities, evaluate new opportunities and shape a long-term roadmap for network intelligence and asset management.

The collaborative approach has created a strong foundation for co-development, enabling Endeavour Energy and nxzen to jointly develop solutions that address current operational needs while supporting the future evolution of the network.

"It is about co-development of ideas — taking it to the next level from a supplier-vendor relationship to a partnership approach."

— Nimal Krishnan, Head of Growth, nxzen

The work

A virtual model for inspecting and monitoring assets

The partnership is focused on Asset Intelligence & Security, enabling Endeavour Energy to meet annual survey requirements and improve visibility across the entire network.

Virtual Greater Sydney LiDAR capture and digital twin

As part of its commitment to strengthening network resilience and improving asset visibility, Endeavour Energy set out to extend its annual survey programme beyond bushfire-prone corridors and develop a more comprehensive understanding of its network and surrounding environment.

Working in partnership with nxzen, Endeavour Energy expanded survey coverage across its entire 24,000 sq km operating area. During each annual survey season, fixed-wing aircraft capture high-resolution LiDAR data across the network, creating a detailed spatial record of powerlines, poles, vegetation and surrounding terrain.

This data is used to develop a comprehensive 4D digital twin of the network (the fourth dimension being temporal). Through annual refresh cycles, Endeavour Energy is building a valuable temporal dataset that provides insight into how vegetation, infrastructure and environmental conditions change over time. This growing intelligence asset supports more informed planning, risk management and operational decision-making across the business.

One of the most significant applications is vegetation management, a critical activity for maintaining network safety and reliability. The digital twin enables Endeavour Energy to identify vegetation encroachments, assess potential risks and prioritise field activities based on actual network conditions, helping teams focus resources where they can deliver the greatest impact.

"85% of our network is bushfire risk area. Safety and resilience is our critical priority, providing energy services, making sure that they're safe, reliable and affordable for all of our customers. So, we needed a great partner that we could work with. nxzen has been a partner we've worked with before and we know they've got the capability to deliver at pace and at scale and they're really innovative. By partnering with nxzen, you're working with people you can trust."

— Melissa Irwin, Chief Data and Sustainability Officer, Endeavour Energy

Beyond supporting Endeavour Energy's own operations, the initiative is creating the foundation for a broader shared intelligence capability. The rich spatial dataset has the potential to deliver value across multiple sectors, including transport, telecommunications, water, insurance and local government, enabling a wider range of organisations to improve planning, asset management and risk mitigation.

Today, annual survey data is evolving from a compliance-driven activity into a strategic operational asset, providing network-wide visibility and supporting safer, smarter and more informed decision-making across Endeavour Energy's service area.

Annual high-resolution pole-top image capture

As part of its commitment to continuously improving network safety, resilience and operational efficiency, Endeavour Energy sought to modernise the way it captured critical asset information across its bushfire-prone network.

Historically, annual inspections relied on low-flying helicopters to collect LiDAR data and pole-top imagery. While effective in supporting compliance and asset management requirements, Endeavour Energy identified an opportunity to enhance the process through the use of emerging technologies that could improve safety outcomes, reduce community impacts and deliver greater operational efficiency.

nxzen and Endeavour Energy developed a new survey methodology that combines fixed-wing aircraft, LiDAR intelligence and advanced drone operations.

Fixed-wing aircraft now conduct network-wide LiDAR surveys from higher altitudes, capturing detailed spatial information across the network. This data is then used to generate automated drone flight paths, enabling crews to safely and efficiently inspect approximately 160,000 pole tops across designated bushfire areas. By leveraging precise spatial intelligence, the system can identify obstacles and optimise inspection routes before field activities commence.

The programme has continued to evolve through a phased approach. Initial surveys established the baseline dataset required to support future automation, while subsequent deployments introduced LiDAR-driven flight planning to improve the efficiency, accuracy and repeatability of pole-top inspections.

The innovation demonstrated through this initiative contributed to industry recognition, including finalist recognition at the Australian energy industry awards. Building on this success, Endeavour Energy is now exploring the next generation of inspection capabilities through trials of drone-in-a-box technology and remote operations, creating opportunities to further enhance safety, efficiency and scalability across the network.

Early outcomes: The new approach has enabled Endeavour Energy to capture approximately 160,000 pole-top images annually while reducing the operational impacts traditionally associated with aerial inspection programs. Compared with the initial deployment, automated drone routing increased daily pole inspection rates by 40%, significantly improved positioning accuracy, reduced operational safety events, eliminated community complaints associated with inspection activities, and lowered carbon emissions.

These outcomes help Endeavour Energy build a more intelligent, efficient and future-ready approach to network inspection and bushfire risk management.

Pole-top defect review and triage

To match the speed and accuracy of the automated capture, nxzen designed a purpose-built Digital Reality Platform (DRP) capable of rendering very large image files (up to 50MB per image) within seconds, enabling experienced inspectors to assess defects rapidly and consistently across the full dataset.

The review workflow operates in two tiers. In Tier 1, a team of specialists rapidly filter pristine poles from those that appear ambiguous or potentially defective. In Tier 2, experienced pole inspectors conduct final assessments and provide sign-off, ensuring accuracy in a safety-critical program.

Over the past two years, approximately 1.2 million pole-top images have been collected and reviewed through this system. This growing dataset is now being used to develop AI/ML models aligned with Endeavour's defect standards, progressively automating the identification of specific defect types while maintaining the precision the program demands.

The result: Experienced inspectors now achieve a productivity rate of 400 to 800 poles per day per operator, and program costs have been reduced by approximately 25% compared to the previous pole-top inspection process. The DRP delivers a scalable, increasingly automated defect triage capability that keeps pace with the annual inspection requirements while laying the data foundation for increasingly intelligent inspection cycles.

The impact

Building a smarter, safer and more resilient network

Through its partnership with nxzen, Endeavour Energy has transformed its annual inspection programme into a comprehensive digital monitoring capability. By expanding network visibility and leveraging data-driven insights, Endeavour Energy is strengthening asset management, improving operational planning, and enhancing network resilience to better serve its customers and communities.

Reliable regulatory compliance: The annual bushfire survey mandate is now completed on schedule every year with significantly reduced operational overhead.
Safer survey operations: Automated drone routing eliminates positioning errors that previously sent crews to wrong assets. Precise LiDAR-based obstacle detection avoids branches, overhangs, and powerline contacts. The shift from low-flying helicopters to high-altitude fixed-wing aircraft has resolved community noise complaints and reduced environmental disturbance.
Improved resource & cost efficiency: The drone programme has resulted in a 40% improvement in productivity, reduced safety incidents from 17 minor incidents to 1 minor incident, and cut survey costs by approximately 25%.
Industry-leading innovation: Automated drone routing earned Endeavour Energy finalist recognition at the Australian energy industry awards. The capability demonstrates how mature LiDAR data and intelligent automation can reduce manual intervention, improve safety, and scale maintenance operations.
Community resilience & cross-sector collaboration: The Greater Sydney Digital Twin creates a detailed LiDAR dataset that enables transport authorities, telecommunications providers, water utilities, and local councils to better understand and mitigate natural disaster risk in their own operations.

What's next?

Innovation continues to steer the partnership as multi-year LiDAR datasets open the door to more predictive capability. The next major initiative is a network connectivity project that will transform the existing digital twin from a static network model into a live simulation platform.

This 'connected' digital twin will be able to model power flow in real time, enabling Endeavour Energy to predict the downstream impact of failures and restore power to customers as quickly as possible in the event of a disruption.