Our Charter
This Charter was approved by the HPEE Management Committee at their meeting of 25 October 2006. It can only be changed by a subsequent majority vote of the Management Committee.
1 The HPEE is a forum for the exchange of information on the engineering issues associated with asset management and maintenance of hydro generation facilities, as distinct from a conference.
2 The forum does not include discussion of commercial or in-confidence issues.
3 The concept of the meeting being an exchange of information, is strongly promoted. Authorities that send delegates are required to participate in this exchange in some tangible way, either by presenting papers or poster presentations, or contributing to the open forum sessions.
4 The HPEE aims to achieve a “hands-on” approach by including engineers, technical officers and tradespersons in its target audience.
5 Attendance is by invitation only.
Invitations are extended to organisations involved with the operation of hydro generation facilities. Invitations are not directly extended to consulting organisations or product and service providers or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM’s).
6 The main focus is on representation from authorities in the Australasian Region but the invitation of representatives (special guests) from appropriate authorities outside this region is permitted.
7 The authorities may be either private companies or government owned businesses.
8 In an endeavour to avoid the repetition of pit falls the HPEE encourages presenters to give open and honest (positive and negative) comments on the issue/s they are discussing. In order to facilitate this type of input it has been past practice not to extend invitations to organisations that have a role as a service provider to the hydro industry.
9 Individual Exchange sessions are conducted over 5 days and comprise a mix of formal presentations, Open Forum sessions and site visits. The site visits are seen to be an extremely valuable component of the Exchange. Where possible they should have some relationship with a presentation made at the meeting.
10 The balance between presentations and site visits has been about 60% / 40%.
11 The papers presented at previous meetings reflect the view of managers of hydro generation assets, both from an asset management and “hands-on” maintenance perspective, with greater emphasis being given in recent years to the relationship of the project being discussed, to the objectives, KRA’s, goals, mission, etc of the organisation. They are usually not a highly technical discussion of design issues.
12 Where a paper comments on a project or activity undertaken by a team, joint authorship is encouraged.
13 Representatives of Service Provider organisations may be joint authors of a presentation of a technical nature. Mere sales presentations are not permitted.
Service Provider representatives who jointly author a paper and wish to be involved in its presentation, are only to attend the session in which the paper is presented.
It is preferred that the author representing the hydro authority submitting the paper, should present it at the HPEE meeting.
14 It has been past experience that there are a number of issues on which a pooling of the experience of the organisations represented at the exchange would be of benefit to all. This has been facilitated through Open Forum sessions. The issues discussed are generally those which are under investigation and for which an organisation is seeking information about the experience of other people in the industry on the matter.
Previous Open Forum sessions have consisted of representatives of each organisation providing a prepared statement of their organisation’s experience on the issue. A list of issues proposed for discussion is circulated well in advance of the exchange It is desirable that a summary of the discussions be prepared and issued after the meeting.
In order to facilitate open and honest discussion, representatives of Service Provider organisations are not to attend the Open Forum sessions.
15 High level overview of the HPEE is undertaken by the HPEE Management Committee. This committee comprises a senior representative of the following organisations:
- Snowy Hydro – Australia
- Hydro Tasmania – Australia
- Trust Power – New Zealand
- Genesis Power – New Zealand
- Mercury Energy – New Zealand
- Contact Energy – New Zealand
- Meridian Energy – New Zealand
- AGL – Australia
- Jo Grilli – New Zealand
- CS Energy – Australia
The main roles of this committee are to:
- oversight the operation of the HPEE forums and ensure that they fulfil the objective of providing a forum for information exchange.
- constantly review the structure of the HPEE and make innovative changes that keep the forum relevant in a dynamic environment.
- manage the process of selecting future host organisations.
- select the papers for presentation at each Exchange meeting
16 The Exchanges are to be held every two years. Individual Exchanges are to be hosted by an organisation that has been involved in previous sessions.
17 The fee charged for attendance is to be determined on a cost neutral basis to the host organisation.
18 Previous HPEE’s have been free of commercial sponsorship as this was considered to weaken the objective of seeking open and honest (positives and negatives) presentations and discussions.
19 The process of selection of papers for presentation at each Exchange is as follows:
- The Organising Committee of the Host utility shall seek expressions of interest in presenting a paper from utilities likely to send representatives to the meeting.
- The initial submissions should give a synopsis of the proposed subject and information on the authors.
- The list of papers to be presented is to be determined by a ballot of the members of the HPEE Management Committee.
20 The Organising Committee of the host utility may invite a limited number of presentations of special interest without them being submitted to the selection process. Normally these papers are to be related to the site visits.
21 All papers are to be written and presented in English.
22 An award for the best presentation / paper is permitted, but not compulsory. Selection of the best presentation / paper is to be by a vote of delegates to the meeting.
23 Authors of papers selected should use best endeavours to attend the Exchange to present their paper and most importantly, answer questions and discuss issues arising from the presentation with other delegates. At least one author of a jointly written paper should attend the Exchange.
To maximise the opportunity for these follow-on discussions it is desirable that authors be present for the whole of the Exchange and not just the day their paper is presented. The Exchange is structured in a manner that facilities this information transfer.
Resource Library
We have compiled an online database containing all the papers presented from 1990 to the present. Browsing is available to all the participating company committee representatives.
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