Case Study: Sustainable Asset Investment Planning at Endeavour Energy
Endeavour Energy (Endeavour) is an electric distribution company that builds, maintains, and operates a $6.7 billion (AUD) network to provide safe, reliable, and affordable power to over a million customers in Australia.
Like many organisations managing critical infrastructure, Endeavour faces constrained budgets, unstable commodity prices, and increasing pressure from stakeholders to demonstrate how capital decisions impact Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability factors.
Endeavour recognised the need to evolve its Asset Investment Planning (AIP) process to optimise the value of its investments. Several factors drove the need for an enterprise-wide transformation, which has led to benefits that not only contribute to business growth and sustainability, but have also earned Endeavour public recognition.
Driving Change
Endeavour wanted to move away from spreadsheet-based calculations to a more transparent, data-driven approach for asset investment decision making.
Another key challenge was evaluating the impact of operations on the environment and customers. Endeavour wanted a way to quantify investment impact on ESG goals and sustainability.
The timing was also ripe for an opportunity—the start of a new multi-year budget cycle meant Endeavour could build a business case to secure funding for an AIP solution that could facilitate and empower its decision making.
These key drivers for change led Endeavour to choose Copperleaf®. The Copperleaf solution addressed Endeavour’s needs, enabled better AIP processes, and helped illustrate the rationale behind capital decisions to the board and management.
Optimizing Strategy
The Copperleaf product suite—consisting of Copperleaf Asset™, Copperleaf Portfolio™, and Copperleaf Value™—allowed Endeavour to optimize its AIP strategy.
Copperleaf’s AI-powered solution and what-if scenarios enhance the transparency and effectiveness of asset investment plans. The optimisation is based on an enterprise-wide value framework that assesses the benefits of all investments on equal footing (e.g., revenue, outages, productivity, safety, environmental risk, cost), to create a plan that meets all constraints and targets.
Endeavour is using Copperleaf’s predictive analytics to determine asset end-of-life and analyse intervention options across its entire fleet. These capabilities enable Endeavour to make more strategic asset investment decisions, sustain assets over the long-term, and deliver on its objective of providing safe, reliable service.
We assessed and incorporated factors that were not on our radar before, and translated these into value for our customers. Copperleaf has helped us understand and quantify the impact of our operations on the environment, as well as the impact of downtime on our customers.
Endeavour Energy
Realising Benefits
The implementation of the Copperleaf product suite has enabled Endeavour to reduce asset risk and increase capital efficiency. Copperleaf’s insightful reports and dashboards also make it easy to communicate the highest-value plans to internal teams, stakeholders, and customers—adding transparency and accountability.
Other benefits and improvements include:
- additional budget headroom
- reduced risk by quantifying environmental, social, and safety impacts
- enhanced sustainability strategy by incorporating ESG factors
- thousands of hours saved by analysing asset risk profiles at a portfolio level
- ability to demonstrate continuous improvement and economic benefits to regulators and customers
Earning Trust
Endeavour is continuing to pave a path toward greater transparency and trust. Following the non-acceptance of its FY20-24 initial and revised proposals to the Australian Energy Regulator, Endeavour saw the power of transparent and defensible decision making when its FY25-29 proposal was approved in the initial stage. This plan was submitted after Endeavour transformed its AIP process using Copperleaf.
The submission not only satisfied the regulator, but also helped Endeavour win the Consumer Engagement Award for 2023 from Energy Consumers Australia and Energy Networks Australia.
Endeavour has lodged a high-quality proposal….There is evidence of an overall good standard in needs analysis, cost benefit approach, option analysis, and transparency in documentation.
Using an AIP solution has enabled Endeavour to understand and evaluate the benefits, costs, and impact of every investment—leading to a more robust, data-driven plan that drives/supports its long-term strategy.
Download the case study to learn more about Endeavour’s journey to sustainable AIP.