2016 – Trustpower’s Approach to Risk Management on a Portfolio Basis

Thomas Fritz and Peter Lilley

A challenge with managing any diverse portfolio of structures is ensuring that expenditure is targeted at achieving the greatest overall improvement while also safeguarding against individual deficiencies. It is also important to ensure that expenditure is predominantly targeted at achieving outcomes rather than lost in over-exhaustive analysis.

Trustpower is a New Zealand based power generation and multi-retail company. Its dam portfolio contains 47 large dams which spans the whole range from low PIC to high PIC structures with a large variety of different dam types.

In 2014 Trustpower collected all available dam safety information on its large dams in a comparative database. All dam safety relevant structures were split into a number of categories for example stability under EQ loadings. Each category was divided into three sub-categories with a resultant total of 2,739 individual sub-categories which were individually rated based on a rating table with 7 ratings ranging from “desirable” to “deficient”.

All new information as it becomes available is being fed into the database and subsequently individual ratings updated as appropriate.

Annually identified tasks get ranked based on a maturity matrix and the tasks that achieve the highest portfolio wide risk reduction costed and put forward for the following’s year budget for execution.

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