The 15 finalists across five categories in the 2026 Awards are below. Congratulations to all our finalists and a huge thank you everyone who entered this year. We look forward to seeing you all at the Awards Ceremony on 14 October.
- Engineering for value
- Innovating for outcomes
- Investing in our industry's future
- Partnering for success
- Solving complex challenges
- Read a 200-word summary of each nomination (pdf)
Category: Engineering for value
A team, individual or organisation that has applied best‑practice design and value principles to improve outcomes, as demonstrated by the greatest whole‑of‑life net benefits.
AECOM, Aurecon, Do Consulting, Niko Engineering, Value at Speed, XER Graphic Design and Transpower: Power transformer in-bund oil containment design
Challenging long-standing tertiary containment approaches has shifted engineering practice and identified a new approach to in-bund oil containment. This approach is expected to save a minimum of $500k per transformer and more than $25 million over 10 years. The solution maintains desired performance and compliance while significantly reducing complexity and construction impact.
Niko Engineering: The Islington 66kV circuit breaker replacement project
This project demonstrates how targeted innovation in primary design can overcome physical and operational constraints, while balancing safety, system availability and cost. Using Transpower’s Value Engineering process, Niko developed a bespoke solution to a challenging circuit breaker replacement, that greatly improved safety while reducing capital and whole-of-life cost, reducing embodied carbon, and eliminating the existing switching issue.
Transpower: Engineering value from smarter data platform design
Disciplined engineering methods have reduced unnecessary data movement, tuned compute-heavy workloads, and redesigned ingestion patterns across the Cloud Data Platform a created a fit-for-purpose and consumption aware design. The outcome has been a 99% reduction in daily dataset inputs, 50% reduction in runtimes, and significant savings in licence and usage fees.
Category: Innovating for outcomes
An engineering or technology initiative that has redefined how things are done, delivering valuable and enduring impacts.
Transpower: Invisible risk to managed risk - redefining asset management
Substation structures and buswork are notoriously complex and difficult-to-manage asset classes. By developing an end-to-end framework, linking inspection, condition assessment, defect identification, project development, and investment decision making, Transpower has uncovered previously hidden safety and reliability risks, cancelled $11 million of unnecessary expenditure, and deferred $22 million of expenditure.
Transpower: Safer, scalable digital switching execution in Transpower control rooms
DSM Switch Execution transformed switch execution by replacing paper-based, manually coordinated switching with system-driven, real-time digital execution. Since go-live, switching-related control room incidents have reduced to zero. The project represents the most significant control room transformation since SCADA was introduced in the early 1980s, establishing a platform for field mobility, analytics, and future automation.
Transpower: Seeing the unseen: reducing risk, time and cost
Managing subsurface utilities has long created safety, planning and cost challenges due to limited visibility of underground assets. By combining field data with iPad-based visualisation and augmented reality, Transpower made underground services visible in real-world conditions. The approach has improved design coordination, excavation safety, asset management and decision-making, while enabling data reuse across sites and delivering significant cost savings.
Category: Investing in our industry’s future
A team, individual or organisation making a bold investment in engineering or technology to deliver high-value outcomes for the future of the industry.
DIALOG Fitzroy: Closing the loop. Transforming abrasive blasting through circular resource recovery
DIALOG Fitzroy have combined smarter work practices, local processing technology and industry collaboration to recover, test and recycle spent garnet. Approximately 75% is now successfully recycled and supplied to other industries, reducing landfill disposal, lowering costs, minimising transport requirements and creating a sustainable reuse pathway for a material previously regarded as waste. It has also established a practical model for future industry change.
ElectroNet Consulting: Graduate programme
ElectroNet Consulting’s Graduate Programme provides a structured pathway for developing future engineers. Through tailored two-year development plans and six-month rotations across technical and operational teams, graduates gain practical experience and build professional networks. The programme has strengthened technical capability, improved engagement and retention, and become the organisation’s largest source of new appointments.
Northpower: Building future inspection capability for New Zealand's transmission network
Northpower has developed two specialist transmission network inspection capabilities. The first is acoustic partial discharge inspection, utilising new-generation acoustic technology. The second is drone-based inspection. A recent programme covered 667 km and captured more than 148,000 images at approximately 60% of forecast cost. Together, these capabilities deliver a scalable, condition-based inspection model that enhances data quality and improves asset visibility.
Category: Partnering for success
An engineering or technology initiative that delivered significant value, where partnering was essential to achieving a successful outcome.
Contact Energy, Fonterra and Transpower: Delivering electrification at Ohangai through partnership
Fonterra’s Whareroa decarbonisation programme required delivery of a new greenfield grid exit point at Ohangai in under 20 months, demanding close collaboration across multiple organisations. Transpower, Fonterra and Contact Energy accelerated delivery through coordinated decision-making, innovative asset management and New Zealand’s first digital substation, creating a resilient, scalable network solution that supports electrification and future regional growth.
Hayes Metals, Macaulay Metals, Phoenix Recycling and Transpower: From grid assets to new value. A national recycling partnership
Transpower, its service providers and specialist recyclers established a national metal recycling panel to consolidate recycling activities and improve safety, quality, environmental performance and reporting. The partnership has expanded recycling pathways beyond metals to include batteries, concrete, glass insulators and relays. The outcome should see Transpower recover approximately $19 million of materials through to 2035.
Northpower: Overcoming complexity. A partnership-driven engineering solution at joint bay 11
A collaborative approach to manage risks through early engagement, shared problem-solving and the use of advanced digital tools was used to address complex cable joint replacements. The outcome was a safe, robust solution delivered with minimal stakeholder disruption, completed 33 days ahead of schedule with no rework. This project demonstrates how engineering innovation, combined with strong partnership, can successfully deliver complex infrastructure outcomes.
Category: Solving complex challenges
A team, individual or organisation that tackled a complex engineering or technology challenge and delivered an elegant solution, embedding both the solution and lessons learned into practice.
APD Global, Calibre, Heron Construction and Transpower: Marine tower foundations - neither land nor sea
Transpower and its partners have developed a repeatable methodology for rebuilding marine foundations in a highly sensitive environment. This has enabled foundations to be rebuilt while maintaining tower support and network security. Four of the five have been completed to date with no unplanned outages, significant injuries or concrete releases.
Transpower: Building a resilience capability to mitigate solar flares impacts
Transpower has developed innovative monitoring and predictive analytics capability to strengthen resilience against solar storm events. This gives control room operators immediate visibility of emerging risks. A Machine Learning model was also developed to forecast the severity of impending solar storms for multiple regions, enabling proactive risk mitigation, improving asset safety, reducing the likelihood of customer disruption, and supporting coordinated industry-wide action.
Transpower: From complexity to confidence. Future-ready cost allocations for grid investments
Transpower’s beneficiary allocation process for major grid investments was modernised by replacing a complex Julia and Excel-based approach with a Python and GitLab solution. The new system reduced calculation time from one to two weeks to under two days, improved auditability and confidence in results, supported a wider range of projects, and delivers ongoing efficiency gains across multiple investments.