Western Power is undertaking essential network renewal and upgrade work in the Three Springs and Geraldton area this week. To minimise the impact on the community, Western Power will be ‘islanding’ Geraldton and surrounding areas.
‘Islanding’ is an approach used to ensure continued power supply to communities while network infrastructure upgrades and maintenance are undertaken.
During `islanding’, Geraldton and surrounding areas are disconnected from the grid and supplied with electricity by Synergy’s gas turbine generators located at Mungarra. Western Power use this island approach regularly to manage planned outages, and it involves significant planning and collaboration with AEMO, Synergy and transmission customers to maintain power supply.
We are fortunate that the network configuration in this area gives us the option of undertaking major network maintenance work without interrupting power supply to customers in these areas.
The generators can be used in the event of planned and unplanned outages. During a planned outage, such as this, customers are slowly and safely switched to the islanded network which is supplied with energy from the generator, avoiding power interruptions.
Islanding will ensure continued power supply to the community while enabling crews to complete essential maintenance works on switchgear located near Three Springs to improve network resilience.
As part of our network renewal and maintenance program, we’re constantly replacing and identifying infrastructure and assets as they age or that have been identified as needing replacing.
Our priority is to ensure the network is as resilient as possible.
We’re working closely with Synergy and AEMO to mitigate the risk of any unplanned disruptions during these essential works.
However, it is important to note that islanding is not a failsafe and that there is always a risk when undertaking such highly complex works that an issue can arise which results in an outage. For this reason, it is prudent for people to pre-prepare for a potential outage if it would have a significant impact on them, like making sure medical equipment, computer and phone batteries are kept charged.
The work is expected to be completed between Tuesday 19 March and Friday 22 March.