UTILIZED SOFTWARE 

Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, Bentley LumenRT, Bentley Raceway and Cable Management, Cesium, iTwin, MicroStation, OpenBuildings, OpenUtilities, Power Line Systems (PLS), ProjectWise, Promis.e, ProStructures, SYNCHRO

LOCATION 

Australia

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY 

APD Global

In Eneabba, Western Australia, APD Global took on a challenge that defines the energy transition: delivering the detailed design for the AU$600+ million Clean Energy Link – North transmission upgrade — some 300 kilometers of line and multiple 132 kV and 330 kV substations — fast enough to keep pace with renewable generation coming online.

The obstacles were as much about coordination as engineering. A global team of 35 engineers worked across five geographically dispersed sites, with more than 70% of secondary system deliverables validated manually through schematic drawings. Conventional, document-centric workflows created severe quality-assurance bottlenecks and left room for site-level errors and wasted material.

The team replaced that model with a connected digital ecosystem — ProjectWise, MicroStation, OpenBuildings, OpenUtilities, ProStructures, Promis.e and PLS-CADD — anchored in model-based workflows on Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, with iTwin and Cesium for spatial context and SYNCHRO for 4D construction sequencing. Crucially, they embedded generative AI to automate the repetitive validation and consistency checks that had consumed the most engineering time.

The results compound. Design time fell 15%, documentation speed and accuracy improved 20%, coordination cycles shortened by 30%, and resolving interdisciplinary conflicts digitally before site execution projected a 20% reduction in rework. Together these savings freed 8,000 work hours and put key milestones 38% ahead of schedule. Sustainability gains followed the same logic: optimized routing and AI-driven quality assurance cut overdesign and material waste by an estimated 10%, while digital collaboration reduced project travel — and its carbon footprint — by roughly 25%. Early-stage carbon analysis informed decarbonization-aligned design decisions throughout.

The outcome is grid capacity for up to 1 GW of renewable energy, delivered ahead of schedule to accelerate the retirement of coal generation — and a digital pilot now shaping how utility assets are managed across their lifecycle.