Mid West residents, businesses skeptical Christmas review will improve power reliability

Many Mid West residents and business owners have little faith the recommendations presented in a review of the Statewide Christmas power outages will resolve blackouts which continue to plague the region. The independent review released last week by Australian Energy Market Commissioner Michelle Shepherd found 107,000 West Australians were affected by the blackouts between Christmas Eve and December 28, with 26,000 Western Power customers without power for more than 12 hours. The Mid West region was particularly affected, with Greater Geraldton one of four areas which experienced the greatest number and duration of blackouts over Christmas. Dongara’s Southerlys Tavern owner Sonia Kerr said the power blackouts had a major impact on her business. “It’s incredibly frustrating, there’s stock losses, lost trade on the school holidays which is irrecoverable, nobody compensates you for loss trade,” she said. “It’s hot, it’s 45 degrees. There’s no power, you’ve got no idea when it’s coming back on, just as frustrating as you could possibly imagine.” While it was not included in the review, Energy Minister Bill Johnston said the extended outage payment scheme would increase from $80 to $120. Mrs Kerr said this was a short-term fix that would only paper over the cracks. “A 50 per cent increase in the outage payment sounds phenomenal, but let’s be realistic, at any one point, somebody losing their whole fridge and freezers worth of food wouldn’t be anywhere, close enough to compensate them even at $120.” “If that costs Western Power a million dollars in claims, is someone actually going to take notice of the fact that money’s just getting wasted and burned.” “So, no it doesn’t go anywhere near addressing it from a business perspective, there’s no calculation to really help compensate when you’re talking, in our case, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock loss.” “That ($120) doesn’t take into account the fact that, your fueling generators and losing income to actually just try and minimise the damage you can.” The review found record-breaking maximum temperatures across the State resulted in an “abnormally high” use of air-conditioners and fans, which put pressure on Western Power’s network. The Bureau of Meteorology told the review team similar conditions and extreme heatwaves were expected to occur more frequently in the future because of the impacts of climate change. Blackouts were extended because of the fire weather conditions, restricting Western Power’s ability to safely restore power until conditions eased. To prevent an outage of similar scale from occurring again, the review recommended improvements to Western Power’s planning and forecasting, approach to fire risk management and operational response to extreme events. It also recommended improvements to customer and community communications and greater transparency of reliability issues. But Mrs Kerr said the measures didn’t go far enough to address the problem. “There’s no preventative measures it’s all about how we respond to the fact that people don’t have power but not about why they should have power.” “In terms of what can be fixed, they can actually address the broken system and put some things in place. Even this weekend, we’ve got some weather conditions and everybody’s concerned the power will go out at some point because it’s going to be humid, windy and hot, and they’re not new conditions. “However, it’s at least having some emergency backup in place or pre-empting. We know the system can’t cater for weather conditions, we know the system is going to fall out. So how about having some backup generators on standby because it isn’t just losing power, it’s losing communication as well.” While the power outages affect her livelihood, Mrs Kerr said the blackouts also put the health and safety of vulnerable people at risk. “For older people who don’t have any means of communication, when the power goes out, you can’t ring anyone, you have no idea if anyone even knows,” she said. Horrocks General Store owner Ellise Drage said her business was also affected by the Christmas outages. “It impacted trade, there was a lot of loss of stock, it severely impacted our ability to be able to provide for the community at that crucial time,” she said. “I have so little faith moving forward that I’ve purchased an $11,000 generator to ensure that we’re not at the mercy of Western Power or other authorities regarding power supply and our ability to provide for this community moving forward.” Mid West Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Joanne Fabling described the Mid West as the “forgotten region” when it came to power infrastructure investment. “We are not in the Perth metro area. Their outages (over Christmas) were terrible but to have over 2500 hours of outages in one summer, clearly we have a major crisis in the Mid West,” she said. But Member for Moore Shane Love had more hope in the review, saying the recommendations would see Western Power held to account for outages affecting blackout hotspots in the Mid West. “One of the problems at the moment is that Western Power is reporting the number of outages over the whole network and if it is meeting performance standards overall, but it is not reporting in granular form where performances aren’t meeting the targets. That will now be known,” he said. Mr Love said the recommendation to improve Western Power’s fire risk management strategies would also benefit Mid West communities. “Western Power will leave communities without power for several days in some instances because of high fire dangers. In the report it talks about the need to balance the need to prevent bushfires with the risk to public safety and community safety by not having power for extended periods,” he said. “That is out of balance at the moment. And would hope we look at working with the authorities to come up with more balanced work practices.” Mr Love said a review should be conducted in several months time to ensure the report recommendations were being implemented.