PCA Ground Engineering has won the Mayor’s Innovation Award at the 2026 Gold Coast Business Awards for K-LoK, a transmission tower foundation renewal system developed and patented by PCA on the Gold Coast.
Ageing high-voltage transmission towers are a growing problem in Australia and internationally. Their foundations are reaching the end of their original design life, and until recently the options were limited to full tower replacement or in-situ mass concrete remediation. Both are expensive, both carry a heavy environmental footprint, and both usually mean taking the line out of service.
K-LoK does the job a different way. It is a proprietary steel pile cap system installed around the existing tower legs, with micropiles drilled into competent rock or soil to carry the structural loads into a renewed foundation. For each project, PCA’s in-house engineering team designs the system to suit the site conditions and loading requirements. The tower stays in service throughout, on a 100-year design life equivalent to new-build standards.
The same approach solves a second problem. Where a tower’s foundations are not at end of life but need to carry greater loads – for higher wind loading under updated design standards, or for new or heavier conductors – K-LoK can be used to upgrade the capacity of the existing foundation rather than replacing it. In both cases, renewal and capacity upgrade, the work is done in place and without taking the line out of service.
What K-LoK delivers
- A fraction of the cost of full tower replacement, for equivalent structural outcomes
- Zero network downtime– the line stays in service throughout
- A 100-year design life, equivalent to new-build foundation standards
- The lowest environmental impactof the four foundation renewal methods assessed, with substantially less concrete and associated CO₂
- Ground disturbance cut from more than 100m² to as little as 5–6m²per tower
- Two applications in one system– end-of-life renewal, and capacity upgrades for new load conditions
The system has been refined over successive deployments for major network operators. Its first commercial project, for Powerlink Queensland on a 132 kV line near Townsville, won the 2017 World Cup of Micropiles, the international peer-judged award run by the International Society for Micropiles for the world’s most innovative micropile project. K-LoK is now patent-protected across five jurisdictions – Australia, the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Canada – and PCA holds the exclusive commercial rights to the system in Australia. It has already been deployed internationally, including a project strengthening transmission tower foundations in California wildfire-affected areas, and PCA is actively pursuing further opportunities to bring the technology to overseas markets where the patents apply.
There is a wider benefit that reaches beyond the network operators themselves. Extending the life of existing transmission assets, many of them already written down, reduces the need for large-scale capital replacement, and that in turn eases some of the upward pressure on electricity prices for the broader community.
The award recognises the technology, and the years of work behind it – taking an idea from concept through to a patented system deployed commercially at home and overseas.
