Powercor and the Bell 407GXi

We have about 77,000 kilometers of overhead power line that we need to inspect and manage. Every year across that 77,000 kilometers, there's somewhere in the realm of 13 to 15 million trees that must be managed and maintained. We are in place to mitigate any fire risk and any safety risk to the public, and by ensuring that vegetation doesn't come into contact or into proximity with our power lines, the 407 has just been a great addition to the fleet. We've used helicopters over the previous three years to replace our ground inspection -- previously we had men and women in cars driving around inspecting our lines, and we've replaced that with three helicopters, which are able to complete the inspection annually in a much quicker and more accurate way. It's predominantly a LiDAR imaging machine -- it has a RIEGL VUX-240 scanner on the back, and it builds a digital model of the power line network as we fly over for bushfire mitigation, which allows us to accurately determine, down to the centimeter level, how close the vegetation is to our power lines. So the efficiency gained by these helicopters and through our inspection methodology allows us more time to plan and more time to cut the vegetation as required. We are the first of the distribution businesses in this country to move to a fully LiDAR-based inspection program. It's just the speed and versatility of the aircraft -- what we can do, we can tackle any terrain in front of us. We fly the distribution network, so it's constantly moving and changing direction, and contouring the ground. We have the four-bladed rotor head, so it's a lot nicer in the turbulence in and around the mountains. Previously we were only able to complete the inspection within 12 months -- now we're able to complete the entirety of our network within eight months. We've got it currently on a 150-hour maintenance release, so we can send it up to Mildura, about four hours from here, for the week, and not have to worry about any maintenance or anything going wrong with it while it's away -- it does its job and comes back.