From Melbourne Metro to the Kangaroo Point Bridge, this year has seen a number of high-profile projects come to fruition.
1. Bridgewater Bridge
Spanning engineering, ecology and heritage, the award-winning Bridgewater Bridge has set new standards for bold urban infrastructure.
“It’s a twin box girder of segmental construction erected using the balanced cantilever technique,” Project Director Peter Fraser explained. “That’s a fairly standard methodology for this span of bridge, although all designs are refined, changed and tweaked for each project.
“We prefabricated 12 barges specifically for the project and then we ballasted them onto the mud flats. That enabled us to build the bridge from the platform where the barge is formed without disturbing the mud and the flora while providing reliable construction access.”
The project actually replaces the old Bridgewater Bridge, which opened in 1946. Its steel truss lift-span structure was once considered cutting-edge. But the need to replace the old bridge has been a long time coming.
“From an economic perspective, the maintenance costs and risk of network disruption from failure were unsustainable,” Fraser said. “And it was getting to the point where it was no longer able to be maintainable.”
The Bridgewater Bridge took out the 2025 Australian Construction Achievement Award, the construction industry’s most coveted prize.
WATCH: How engineers used precast and piling innovations when constructing the new Bridgewater Bridge
2. Melbourne Metro
More than 42 m below the Melbourne CBD, a new metro tunnel is set to transform the city’s rail network.
With twin nine-kilometre tunnels, five deep-level stations, advanced signalling and a high-capacity communications-based train control (CBTC) system, this $15 billion piece of infrastructure is set to reshape how commuters move through the heart of the city.
The Metro Tunnel introduces Australia’s first network‑wide deployment of a CBTC system on a broad‑gauge railway. The Siemens HCS system uses continuous bidirectional radio communication between trains and control centres, replacing fixed‑block signalling with moving‑block operations.
Key features of the signalling infrastructure include:
- Real‑time train positioning
- Automatic train protection
- Integrated control
- Fail‑safe redundancy
This system allows a higher line capacity of up to 60 per cent, optimising dwell times and throughput without expanding track infrastructure. HCS also allows dynamic scheduling and adaptive speed profiles, reducing energy use and mechanical wear.
READ: Look inside the new Melbourne Metro
3. EnergyConnect
Work is underway to connect the energy grids in NSW, Victoria and South Australia to improve reliability and security of electricity supply, and allow for future connections from renewable energy sources.
The 900 km transmission line is being built between Wagga Wagga in NSW and Robertstown in South Australia, with a connection to Red Cliffs in Victoria, and has been identified as critical to realising the Federal and NSW Governments’ shared vision for a clean energy future.
In order for the project to successfully connect the energy grids of the three states and integrate into the National Electricity Market, significant works are underway at the three substations.
The main hub is the 16 ha Buronga substation in South-West NSW, which is recognised as one of the largest and most complex substations in the Southern Hemisphere. It has successfully commissioned Australia’s first ever 330 kV phase shifting transformers, manufactured by Hyosung, each with a capacity of 200 MVA.
It is also the first substation in the world with five phase-shifting transformers running in parallel, which provides improved load sharing, enhanced transmission capacity and reduced congestion.
READ: Bringing Australia’s largest energy transmission project to life
4. Kangaroo Point Bridge
Built as part of Brisbane City Council’s Bridges for Brisbane Program, the Kangaroo Point Bridge is an active transport bridge designed to reduce 84,000 car trips across the river annually, as part of an overall transportation mode shift that’s also seen the introduction of the Brisbane Metro system.
And it may look graceful, but the bridge’s design is actually non-traditional. A pair of torsionally rigid trapezoidal steel boxes form the superstructure, which boasts a short back span matched by a much longer main span.
“If this had been a slab placed on I-girders or a very slender precast concrete deck, the behaviour would have been quite different, because it wouldn’t have torsional rigidity,” said Thomas Cooper, National Technical Director at WSP.
“Look at the grandfather of suspension bridge disasters, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. In that instance, you had a really narrow deck and a really long span which ended up acting like a rope – whipping around because the system lacked torsional rigidity. We avoided those risks through the trapezoidal steel-box design.”
READ: Unconventional elegance meets precision engineering
5. Energys hydrogen fuel cell generator
Energys has been responsible for Australia’s first commercial deployment of 10 kW hydrogen fuel cell generators across five remote telecommunications sites in Victoria. The project, commissioned in 2024 but recognised as Project of the Year at the 2025 Engineers Australia Excellence Awards, replaced existing diesel generators with hydrogen fuel cells. This eliminated the risk of diesel theft while also bringing decarbonisation gains.
“Our client, Telstra, wanted to reduce the carbon footprint from its telecommunication towers,” said Sam Rowe, Engineering Manager at Energys. “That was the primary driver for the project. But existing technologies weren’t necessarily meeting their requirements.
“Many of the telecommunication sites use diesel gensets. Because they are designed as an emergency backup power system, a diesel genset means you can run into issues like the need for regular maintenance. Then there are issues with diesel going stale if it’s not stored properly, so the storage life wasn’t ideal.”
Energys required a backup power superior to that achievable with batteries, in order to address Telstra’s energy demand. Hydrogen fuel cells emerged as the most viable solution, not least due to the relatively competitive costs of maintenance.
“One of the problems we face in the fuel cell industry is that various subsystems and components – the DC converters and inverters, the power conditioning pieces of our equipment – aren’t actually designed to be compatible with certain fuel cells,” Rowe said. “A lot of this equipment would normally have been developed for batteries, solar panels or other forms of electrical generation or electrical storage.”
Explore the latest trends, innovations and best practices across construction at the Australasian Structural Engineering Conference 2026.
