Western Power working to provide quicker power restoration to Goldfields residents

Western Power chief executive Sam Barbaro has assured the Goldfields community the company is working to provide quicker and more certain power restoration after residents voiced concerns at an energy forum on Wednesday.

Mr Barbaro said executive manager of asset management Gair Landsborough had recently visited Kalgoorlie-Boulder to provide direct updates to key stakeholders.

“We know timely and informative customer communications is essential and we’re improving these by putting in additional measures to ensure residents and businesses are kept up-to-date,” he said.

He said the direct email distribution list for unplanned outages had been updated to add relevant stakeholders and improvements were made to the company’s SMS system “to ensure customers affected are directly contacted”.

Mr Barbaro also noted Western Power used other avenues of communication such as ABC radio to provide updates on outages.

He said the company’s network control service agreement with Synergy for alternative power generation via the West Kalgoorlie terminal gas turbine maintained supply for planned and unplanned outages of the 220kV transmission network.

“To support customers being restored in the quickest time, we’ve responded to stakeholder feedback and revised our operational procedure to ensure that we immediately make an application for approval to switch on the gas turbine station when there is an unplanned outage on the 220kV transmission network,” Mr Barbaro said.

He said Wester Power was also investigating measures to improve reliability by reviewing protection systems and settings to minimise outages because of transient events such as lightning or vegetation interference.

“When an unplanned outage occurs, Western Power must apply to AEMO for the Network Control Service generator to be deployed,” Mr Barbaro said.

“Upon dispatch, the Eastern Goldfield area needs to be ‘islanded’ from the main network, the NCS generators must be started, and then essential services load and small use customers are progressively connected in stages as the generation level ramps up.”

He explained this process usually took two to three hours but could take slightly longer during certain conditions and depending on the load.

“We are also continuing to review if we can speed up the procedure that is in place to make sure that the ‘islanding’ process is safely and effectively implemented. It is unlikely that any changes to the process will reduce the timeframe to less than an hour,” Mr Barbaro said.

“If we ramp up the generation too quickly, it is possible that the NCS generators will trip off and then we need to start the whole process again, which is counter-productive.”