In 2022, Structex embarked on a journey with Seipp Construction and Meridian Energy to enhance the seismic resilience of the Benmore Hydro Station Penstocks, a key asset within New Zealand's second-largest hydro facility. Structex has played a key role in this project, ensuring the long-term resilience of this critical infrastructure while optimising costs and constructability for our client and stakeholders.

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A Trusted Advisor

As design manager and a trusted advisor to Seipp Construction and Meridian Energy, we worked closely with stakeholders throughout this project, facilitating workshops, leading discussions, and developing a deliverables plan that ensured clarity and alignment across all parties. Independent peer reviews, including an international penstock design assessment, reinforced confidence in the overall recommended approach.

Technical Alignment with Strategic Goals

To ensure the project team was delivering to the expectations of the Board, we created links between strategic-level thinking of the Board to technical-criteria within the design, and navigated stakeholders and the project team through this. Simple sketches were employed as a means to articulate this to people with a range of backgrounds and technical expertise. This positively influenced key parts of the business case presented back to the Board.

Cost-Effective Solutions

In close collaboration with Seipp Construction, Structex developed a progressive temporary and permanent works methodology for replacing the Penstock’s 636 elastomeric support bearings. This allows the penstocks to remain operational and the units generating power during the replacement works – a huge opportunity for Meridian, who would otherwise be looking at long-duration outages. Through optioneering, this methodology was honed-in on as it eliminated and reduced the highest number of safety and asset damage risks, enhances control over the works and enables future localised bearing replacements, resulting in an extremely cost-effective solution.

Buildable and Maintainable

The interaction between complex constraints on site, operational requirements of the power station, and seismic performance targets resulted in a ‘dance’ to balance a design that Seipp Construction could readily build, and Meridian Energy could readily operate and maintain. Applying a Safety by Design approach has guided this and informed decision making throughout. This led to creative development of temporary works, including bespoke winches and slope delivery systems which are critical to the methodology.

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