What real-time automation delivers at 90%+ renewable penetration that manual processes cannot 

The data architecture and integration work that had to happen before the control system could function 

The incidents the system caught before they became outages - the operational value that doesn't appear in the project business case 

The prioritisation challenge: how EDBs are deciding what to reinforce, defer, and replace with a digital or demand-side alternative 

Where condition-based asset management is replacing time-based replacement - and what that requires from data and sensing infrastructure 

The EDB collaboration mandate: what standardisation and shared investment actually looks like across 29 networks

The data investments producing the biggest operational returns - and the ones that looked good in the business case but haven't delivered 

From data collection to decision support: the organisational and cultural change required to make analytics operationally useful 

What the best-performing NZ utilities are doing with data that others aren't - and how replicable it is 

Beyond failure prediction: how outage planning and sequencing itself is becoming a data-driven decision 

How outage valuation is helping teams weigh cost, risk and generation value, and when it actually changes the plan 

The adoption gap: why the hardest part isn't building the model, it's embedding it into planning workflows and getting asset owners, engineers, and planners to trust it enough to act differently 

The integration challenge: connecting the digital twin to SCADA, GIS, and field operations in a live environment 

Scenario modelling for grid reinforcement - where digital twins are accelerating decisions that used to take months 

What a digital twin programme costs over five years vs. what it saves - the honest whole-of-life business case 

The OT/IT convergence threat: where legacy SCADA systems create the most exposure as digital integration accelerates 

What a successful cyber attack on NZ energy infrastructure would actually look like - and why it's more likely than the sector acknowledges 

Building security culture in engineering organisations: the people and process investment behind every effective OT security programme 

How Alpine Energy managed a high-profile pricing error that attracted significant media attention and scrutiny from the Commerce Commission. 

The governance, risk management, and people leadership challenges involved in navigating a regulatory event of this nature, offering a valuable alternative perspective to the major weather-event case studies often discussed within the sector. 

Key lessons learned and how these experiences can be translated into practical insights for other C-suite executives facing complex operational, regulatory, and reputational challenges. 

Labour shortages are already constraining project delivery across the NZ energy sector, and the pipeline is only growing. This session puts the workforce crisis on the table and asks the sector to own its share of solving it.  

The numbers: how many engineers, project managers, technicians, and tradespeople does the NZ pipeline need over the next five years, and how far short is the current training and recruitment pipeline?  

As the workforce scales up fast, are new hires and contractor networks coming in with the skills, safety standards, and risk maturity the industry actually needs, or is the sector growing headcount faster than it can grow capability?  

Māori workforce development, international recruitment, and apprenticeship models as structural solutions to a structural problem  

What large industrials need from clean energy supply that they're not currently getting -- on PPA terms, connection timelines, and volume certainty  

The decarbonisation commitments already made by NZ's largest energy users -- and what happens to those commitments if the supply isn't there   

Where generators and large consumers are genuinely partnering well -- and where commercial incentives are still misaligned.