As a nation straddling two tectonic plates in the midst of open ocean, New Zealand is beset with natural hazards. Our electricity network consists of fragile conductors spanning faults and landslips or buried in liquefiable soils. This paper aims to highlight methods to improve our situational awareness of real-time risk by combining what we know about the electricity network’s exposure to natural hazards with currently available real-time data describing the hazards. This can improve our resilience by more precise deployment of repair crews and pre-emptive management of supply routing. It also looks at the potential for better real-time understanding of network condition by leveraging the technological advances made by the demand for Sensing Cities and the ‘internet of things’. These have driven the development of low-cost, low-power sensors, along with low-cost communications backbones that enable us to build affordable massive real-time datasets measuring a diversity of variables. These could potentially indicate risk at a resolution down to individual pylons or poles, pre-empting failure.