Response to ERA report on Western Power's reliability

Release Date: 25 February 2008

The electricity distributors’ performance report released today by the Economic Regulation Authority (ERA) highlights the extent of the challenges involved in managing one of the world’s largest isolated networks.

Western Power General manager Customer Services, Mark de Laeter, said maintaining, upgrading and expanding the Western Power network, which covers approximately 322,000 square kilometres, is a matter of balancing the need to overcome an historic period of under-spending on the health of the network while meeting the demands of exponential growth at a time of a severe skilled labour shortage and rising costs.

Last year an unusually high level of outages related to bushfires and lightning, and contributed to lower reliability performance.

Overall the frequency of power outages was relatively unchanged from previous reporting periods.

Mr de Laeter said while Western Power recognised power reliability wasn’t yet where customers wanted it to be, the overall reliability for the network of 99.9% was a solid base. He said work to improve reliability was ongoing and would continue in the coming years. 

“The commitment in the last budget to invest a record $3.5 billion in the network over a four year period recognised the size of the workload facing the business and highlights the reality that the changes will not happen over night.”

“It will take time for this investment to gain traction and translate into, improved reliability figures.

Reliability figures for the 06/07 period showed that;

  • On average power was available across the network for 99.95% of time,
  • 23% of power interruptions related to planned outages,
  • 27% of power interruptions related to factors beyond Western Power’s control, such as car crashes, vandalism, storms, bushfires, lightning etc.
  • 30% of power interruptions related to equipment failure including pole top fires
  • The bulk of the remaining outages, 18%, related to faults of unknown cause. Reasons for these outages could include, lightning, debris blowing across powerlines etc. An unknown cause is recoded when no evidence of the cause is found.

“Western Power has a significant spending program to improve power reliability and is carrying out a record capital works program in a time of a severe skilled labour shortage.

“Western Power aims for a 25 per cent improvement in reliability by 2009.

“The level of growth in the network has made this target more challenging as additional resources and funding are required to meet the record growth of the south west,” Mr de Laeter said.

Western Power is focusing on three key programs to improve reliability:

  • The automation project. This involves installing hundreds of automated protection devices in targeted areas to reduce the impact on the network of an unplanned  interruption and to reduce the time taken to locate faults.
  • Targeted upgrading of poor performing feeders. This involves reinforcing the first few kilometres from substations of power lines to improve their performance.   This is important because a fault close to a substation affects all the customers on a line
  • 40 Worst Feeder Program. This is a targeted maintenance program that focuses work to the 40 poorest performing powerlines in the network, 20 in metropolitan and  20 in regional areas.

Reliability levels fluctuate substantially from year to year due to the occurrence of storms, lightning, bush fires, car crashes and vandalism.

Contact us

If you have any questions regarding this media release please email us: media@westernpower.com.au