Maintenance of the gauging network / modem upgrades
Hunter River Salinity Trading Scheme Performance Report 2023–24.
In the 2023-24 period the communications hardware at each of the WaterNSW river monitoring gauges was upgraded by the Service Coordinator to ensure the gauges stayed capable of communicating via the incoming 5G network.
The rollout took place between April and June 2024.
Table 7: Summary of 4G modem upgrades
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| 20/2/2024 | 4G Modems were supplied to all scheme participants by WaterNSW |
| 23/4/2024 – 19/6/2024 | 4G Modem and Logger Commissioning was completed for Warkworth, Mt Thorley, Liddell Coal, HVO West, HVO South, HVO North, Bayswater, Bengalla, Mt Arthur, Wambo, Dartbrook, Ravensworth |
Throughout the 2023–24 period, WaterNSW completed several maintenance activities on its gauging system for the Scheme. Maintenance of the network is ongoing. Where gauges at key sites (Denman, U/S Glennies and Singleton) are down, backup gauges are available to continue monitoring the river. When gauges at sites with no backup are offline, Water NSW must extrapolate data using the water model to monitor and forecast flows.
Water NSW also monitors industry participants’ telemetry daily. When a participant’s telemetry is down, Water NSW will contact them to notify them of the issue and request immediate action for them to resolve. Mount Pleasant Operations of MACH Energy Australia were added to the HRSTS scheme and included in the HRSTS model production system. Redbank Power station also began to setup new Telemetry Hardware in anticipation of rejoining the scheme under their licence. Mt Thorley communicated plans for their discharge point to have a second release point, one from each of their dams at their existing discharge point site. Both release points discharging to the same spill point, so travel times will be the same, but discharge capacity increased.