Modernisation
Building the Future for Irrigation in Northern Victoria
Since 2002, Goulburn-Murray Water has been modernising our region's irrigation infrastructure at various levels, from the main supply channels right through to the individual outlets. While modernisation will achieve significant water savings through a more efficient supply network, its primary goal is to ensure the ongoing viability of irrigated agriculture through improved irrigation services and a cost-effective delivery network.
Goulburn-Murray Waters growing expertise and capability are allowing us to expand our efforts to plan for modernisation on a broad scale across all regions. The modernisation strategy is essential to fulfilling our current and future economic, social and environmental obligations to our customers, our community and our stakeholders including the environment.
A Growing Source of Local Expertise - G-MW Staff and Suppliers
Goulburn-Murray Water is rapidly accumulating substantial expertise in all aspects of modernisation. Each stage of the process calls for a different mix of skills from system anaysis, project design, community consultation and financial management to the evaluation and selection of modernisation techniques.
Goulburn-Murray Water are continually streamlining key aspects of modernisation project design. Our staff now have access to Goulburn-Murray Water developed 'decision tools' and 'asset solutions' to determine modernisation techniques that are most appropriate to the needs of the district.
The streamlined systems harness Goulburn-Murray Water's growing system knowledge and experience in designing and implementing modernisation projects. They also ensure projects take account of the full range of factors, from soil type and infrastructure usage to council zoning and local amenity that must be considered in developing modernisation programs that are relevant to the local region. We expect that irrigation districts just beginning their reconfiguration efforts will progress more rapidly as a result of these tools, and Goulburn-Murray Water's growing experience.
Technology Enhances System Knowledge
Rigorous monitoring and analysis are essential to understanding the performance of our existing irrigaiton system at all levels. Goulburn-Murray Water continue to substantially improve technology in place to support this analysis and have commenced a range of initiatives to improve the speed and accuracy of our system monitoring.
The Strategic Meaurement Project (SMP) continues to grow with automated gates in place across all ofthe major channels in the Goulburn-Murray region. The network provides real time information and monitoring of the channel network. This information assists our understanding of how the network operates allowing the comparison of performance along sections of the network. This information will enable more effective targeting of automation and channel remediation efforts and will also assist in identifying and evaluating opportunities for improvements and rationalisation.
Goulburn-Murray Water's Geographic Information System (GIS) was launched in June 2007 and is another important new tool that allows Goulburn-Murray Water staff to view and analyse all current system information in live, electronic map format. It has already enhanced our understanding of how the various components of the system interact, and improved our ability to undertake anaylsis of individual pods and outlets as part of our modernisation strategies.
During 2007 Goulburn-Murray Water undertook a metering pilot testing program to evaluate the performance of various irrigation meters in the field. The project has improved our understanding of existing meter technololgy and the potential for existing meters to meet the more stringent tolerances required under the proposed National Meteorological Standard. With meter error one of the key contributors to 'lost' water, the testing program is helping Goulburn-Murray Water deliver water savings.
