Review slates power distributors over response to severe outages
A report into the response from Victorian electricity distributors following February’s severe wind storm has laid the groundwork for regulatory change, with AusNet singled out.
The Network Outage Review’s interim report, released on Thursday, has laid the groundwork to eventually recommend regulatory change to push Victorian power distributors to achieve timely restoration in the wake of significant outages.
In February, a wind storm which saw wind speeds of up to 150km/h left one farmer dead, levelled houses in regional Victoria and saw more than a million Victorians lose power, with rural towns Mirboo North, Monbalk, Gembrook, Emerald and Cockatoo the most severely affected.
More than 531,000 Victorians were without power at the outage’s peak, as 1100 power lines were downed due to the storm.
The report comes amid heightened fear of a future power price crisis amid the federal government’s green power push.
The review found that “current regulatory mechanisms do not incentivise distribution businesses to achieve timely restoration of the tail of customers without power”, and – among 51 “soft” recommendations – recommended the Essential Service Commission review the Electricity Distribution Code of Practice and its incentive schemes, including potentially making distributors “accountable for providing financial support to customers during events”.
This would effectively give distributors more incentive to avoid poor responses to mass outages, the report lays out.
The report also found community members need more accurate and timely information during a major outage.
Customers of distributor AusNet were worst affected during the storm. Of the 360,000 AusNet customers who lost power supply, 6 per cent still had no power 72 hours after the storm, with 4000 customers still without power a week from the event.
AusNet, which on Thursday was also fined $200,000 for installing an unprotected high-voltage power line in a bushfire risk zone east of Melbourne, bore the focus of much of the interim report. The review found “AusNet’s systems, planning, technology for monitoring, planning and restoring outages did not have the capacity, functionality and integration for the event of this scale”.
The review found AusNet’s ability to disemminate its information was particularly poor, as its outage tracker site crashed during the storms and the company did not have the community relationships necessary for providing information, such as online and physical message boards.
Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources Lily D’Ambrosio said: “It’s clear that improvements must be made in the way privately owned power companies respond to extreme weather events and how they communicate with the residents and businesses who rely on them.”
The report did note that given Ausnet’s defective systems, infrastructure and event planning, the company did the best it could in managing the outage and communicating with customers.
The report noted as an ongoing concern “numerous AusNet and some United Energy feeders consistently rank as some of the worst performing in Victoria”. The review recommended distributors locate their 10 worst-performing transmission feeders and report on them in their annual reports.
Damage caused by the storms was severe, and the report found Victorians were concerned with the danger posed by downed power lines yet had no information on how best to deal with them, with one Mirboo North resident saying: “It was anxiety inducing driving over downed powerlines.
“Is there a way AusNet could have notified emergency responders and the community that wires were not live? … There were powerlines laying on roads for days.”
The report suggested an update to the code of practice “ to require distribution businesses to report powerlines down/infrastructure damage and repair/works status on their outage trackers”.
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