Experts to review Victoria’s energy crash after extreme storms

An expert panel will review the strength of Victoria’s distribution network and energy companies’ response to destructive storms that left more than half a million homes without power, as the opposition continues to push for a separate parliamentary probe.

Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio announced initial details of the independent review on Tuesday but denied it was in response to the Coalition’s push. The opposition said a parliamentary inquiry would provide better scrutiny and place more pressure on the state to act on its findings.

Transmission lines wrecked by last week’s wild weather.Credit: Jason South

More than 3000 homes are still without power a week after extreme winds lashed the state, bringing down trees onto power lines and tearing down a transmission line near Geelong.

That critical line going down forced the Loy Yang A power station to trip off, leaving 90,000 homes without power while there was a shortfall in demand. Another 440,000 homes lost power at about the same time because of damage to local poles and wires.

D’Ambrosio said in response to these outages the state had set up a “supplementary review into the electricity system, the assets and how they were managed as a result of last week’s events”.

The Allan government has not yet released the terms of reference for the review, but says it will investigate how electricity distributors managed the incident and how effective they were at getting power restored quickly.

This will include whether there were ways to better reconnect customers through more field crews, the effectiveness of outage trackers and how to improve communications with affected households.

The Victorian government will ask the Australian Energy Regulator, which oversees how electricity and distribution companies fund their maintenance and repairs, to provide information to the panel about the resilience of the system.

D’Ambrosio said other authorities were investigating issues related to the storms. Energy Safe Victoria is investigating the collapse of the collapse of the six transmission towers at Anakie, 20 kilometres north of Geelong, and the Australian Energy Market Operator provided an initial report into the resilience of the grid.

“The community quite rightly have many questions that they want answered,” she said.

Details of the review were released after the state opposition on Monday announced it would push for an upper house inquiry into the storms and the impact on Victoria’s energy network.

It will also examine energy storage, maintaining current energy infrastructure and how to ensure Victoria has reliable distribution networks necessary to support more renewables in the grid.

D’Ambrosio on Tuesday denied the government-commissioned review was in response to the Coalition’s proposed select committee, labelling their proposal “a bunch of politicians going around for 15 months without any expertise at all”.

“This has been a discussion that we’ve been having internally now for a couple of days,” D’Ambrosio said.

D’Ambrosio said Victoria had been the first state to launch a review into the resilience of the electricity network after damaging storms in 2021, which the new panel would build on.

But the opposition on Tuesday said the government had failed to address all the findings from its 2021 review.

They said one recommendation to submit a rule change to the National Electricity Rules, forcing distribution businesses to include resilience in their investment plans, had been accepted but not yet finalised.

“Labor’s failure to act on this report and its recommendations demonstrates they cannot be trusted to deliver the reliable and secure energy network Victorians deserve,” Opposition Leader John Pesutto said.

Workers trying to restore power in the Dandenong Ranges this week.Credit: Justin McManus

“Year after year and review after review, Labor has ignored the warnings about the vulnerability of our energy network and left Victorian households and businesses to pay the price.

“I can tell you this: any inquiry that Jacinta Allan proposes will not be a fair dinkum inquiry. It’ll be one guaranteed to protect her and her government from legitimate questions.”

The Coalition needs the support of at least eight of the 12 crossbench MPs to get their parliamentary inquiry up.

Of the more than 3000 homes still without power, 2500 are expected to have a “long tail” recovery, according to Emergency Services Minister Jaclyn Symes.

“It’s down to house-to-house connections that can take some time,” she said.

Symes said while there were pockets of lingering outages across the state, Mirboo North in Gippsland was the epicentre and authorities were still working to assess the exact number of uninhabitable homes.

She also said there was more wild weather on the horizon.

“We are expecting higher temperatures, more in the Mallee and the northern country. But what we’re alive to and probably what we’re probably most worried about is heavy downpours on Thursday,” she said.

She said authorities would provide more detail by Wednesday if the weather reports coming in “become a concern”.