Temporary towers to provide electicity to nearly all industrial customers in Mid-North
TEMPORARY towers are going up to provide power to the Mid-North and fire up our storm-ravaged industries — all but one major player.
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ALL of South Australia’s major industrials — bar BHP Billiton — should have their power restored by late Sunday, with restoration crews working feverishly in the Mid-North to establish temporary transmission towers.
Speaking in front of a crumpled dual-circuit transmission tower at Melrose yesterday, ElectraNet’s network services executive manager Simon Emms said the installation of five temporary towers would allow one of the circuits to re-energise on Sunday, restoring power to almost all industrial customers.
A second circuit needs to be restored for the power to return to BHP’s Olympic Dam operations – with Mr Emms hoping that process would be finalised by the middle of next week.
Sixty crew members are currently working on the restoration effort at Melrose involving temporary towers from both South Australia and NSW, with further crews also set to be established near Blyth.
Mining operations at Olympic Dam have been suspended since last week’s statewide power outage, triggered by an overload of the electricity interconnector and a storm that felled 22 transmission towers throughout the state.
ElectraNet chief executive Steve Masters said major industrials were “well informed” about the restoration process, with ElectraNet having multiple discussions a day with impacted users.
A permanent fix remains further away, with Mr Emms saying ElectraNet hoped to have new permanent towers in place by Christmas.
“Our focus has been doing the designs for these temporary structures — there will be three circuits with temporary circuits put up. As soon as that’s finished and the engineers’ efforts on site are done we will be starting the design for the permanent fix,” Mr Emms said.
ElectraNet said it was unlikely the new permanent towers would have the same design as the ones that were toppled by high winds.
“When you build a tower like this you have large production runs so these will probably be a different design and they may actually be very large poles, not actually lattice towers,” Mr Emms said.
“These towers were built in the 1980s and since then we’ve built very few transmission towers, so we haven’t actually had a need to refresh our designs but all our designs do meet the standards of the time they were designed.”
Mr Masters said engineers on the site had believed they would never see anything like the extreme weather event that downed the towers, but both he and Mr Emms indicated it would not have a significant impact on the new towers’ design.
“The criteria the design has to meet is based on the expected weather conditions — I wouldn’t suggest one event necessarily provokes a need to review this but as part of the process we will obviously review the conditions it needs to be designed to withstand,” Mr Emms said.
Mr Masters was loath to comment about the exact circumstances that caused the statewide outage, saying the preliminary Australian Energy Market Operator report had provided some answers, with a further report expected to provide much more clarity still some time away.