By Jeff Allen, EESA national president
The recent announcement of the closure of the Lane Cove Testing Station has sent shock waves through the electricity supply industry. This well-known facility, which last year celebrated its 50th birthday, is majority owned and operated by Ausgrid.
The facility was initially established to provide high current testing services to the Australian electrical industry because of some world-class analysis by Sydney County Council engineers of the day. It was initially trialled at Blackwattle Bay for a period and then was established at Lane Cove via direct connections to the adjacent 132kV network. Lane Cove Testing Station evolved to become a world-class testing facility with the capability of high current testing of up to 100kA for one second. Certification of LV switchboards has been the predominant workstream, and in its early days of operation oscillograms were analogue, and reporting was manual. Digitalisation of measurement was a significant investment to update the facility some years ago.
The Australian electrical equipment manufacturing industry (the main customers of the facility) have indicated that the Lane Cove High Current Test Facility is a unique specialist high current electrical testing station, and this capability is a critical function for the ‘type testing’ of new electrical equipment designs. This testing is often mandated by Australian and New Zealand design standards and in some instances by Government Regulation. The testing is also a key component of R&D for the development of new electrical equipment utilised within Australia and for export. While there are alternate test facilities located in other countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, India, Holland, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Russia, Canada, and the USA that could be utilised by Australian electrical equipment manufacturers, the logistics and costs in utilising an offshore facility are exponentially higher and would be totally cost prohibitive for most Australian manufacturers.
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While the HV testing capabilities can technically be replicated elsewhere, there are few (if any) existing laboratories in the southern hemisphere that are purpose-designed as a high-throughput commercial testing facility offering such a range of end-to-end testing services.
Thus, the closure of Lane Cove can only serve to hinder or discourage the development of new Australian products as well as effectively eliminating research and development (R&D) capabilities that have investigated and ameliorated many significant Australian electrical safety problems and in numerous cases have provided safety leadership on a global basis.
It is estimated that the affected local manufacturers employ more than three thousand people, and the closure potentially places many of these jobs in jeopardy. The proposed closure would remove a significant R&D capability within Australia for electrical equipment design, which will impact on Australia across most industry sectors. There is a general view that electrical equipment design and manufacturing within Australia has a major role in supporting our defence capability, energy security, energy climate change transition, manufacturing, mining, transport, and education areas. This area of equipment R&D and associated equipment testing is particularly important given the significant changes occurring in the electric energy area due to the growth of Distributed Energy Resources as one example.
It is recognised that the present owners of Lane Cove Testing Station may not be recouping a sufficient return on investment and that a change of control and/or funding is necessary for it to be retained. One important issue is that the facility’s current location is critically important due to its need to be close to a high-capacity transmission node such that the impact of high current tests has a minimum impact on the quality of supply to adjacent customers. Alternative locations would not be found easily or quickly and would involve high expenditure in moving and updating the testing facilities as well as enabling appropriate electrical connections.
Also, one of the key attributes of the Lane Cove Testing Station is that it has NATA as well as ASTA certification. ASTA registration is difficult to attain, and it is likely that the existing registration would not be transferable to a new facility.
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One of the biggest challenges in high-current testing is to stop extremely high magnetic fields from degrading measurement accuracy. Electric fields are somewhat easier to deal with in measurement terms. Accordingly, assessment of measurement accuracy in a high-current laboratory is far more specialised than for other more general electrical laboratories. Thus, high-current testing has some unique features, not only in terms of containing explosive forces, but also in terms of instrumentation and measurement accuracy in a high magnetic field environment–hence the common requirement by clients to have an ASTA test certificate rather than a report issued by a NATA registered lab.
One example of the likely impact that closure will have is the probable market exit of every LV board manufacturer in Australia. The replacement boards would be imported and un-tested unless they are assembled from pre-tested components (noting that the assembly will not have been tested). However, many LV boards are bespoke designs, and these will all either be untested or tested in a facility that can provide no guarantee of measurement accuracy. An arcing fault on a LV board or mechanical failure under fault current (or both) has significant safety consequences and there is general agreement of the need for such testing to maintain Australia’s high safety standards.
The industry participants affected are developing a strategy to deal with the issue, and there have been many meetings with affected electric energy industry manufacturers and suppliers, industry associations and government representatives to ensure everyone fully understands the implications of the closure of this facility.
Hopefully, a satisfactory solution to this important challenge will be found.
