Yorke Peninsula Power Outage

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (15:03): My question is to the Minister for Mines and Energy. Can the minister confirm that ElectraNet and SAPN perform proactive routine cleaning of key insulators along our power network? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr ELLIS: I have heard from a former linesman who worked for SAPN who claimed that whilst he was an apprentice he used to regularly clean insulators in January, but that no longer happens. A farmer with transmission lines that run through his paddock says he hasn't had a notice of a helicopter clean for at least three years.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (15:04): Yes, I note that the member has excellent contacts with people who work in the industry and I am very keen to hear from them. Just to give the house a brief update, South Australia Power Networks, which is the distribution arm of our electricity system which delivers power to your home from substations, have a guaranteed service level that they must meet. Transmission lines do not. They are given incentivisation packages by the Australian Energy Regulator to try to meet service reliability. Now, at the end of any regulatory period the periods of time with or without power are assessed, which depends then on the level of incentive paid.

I am very concerned by what happened on the weekend. The first object should always be to get power back on as fast as possible, especially during the day, especially when it is hot, especially in communities where there are a lot of people who are reliant on air conditioning and businesses that are relying on electricity for work. If there needs to be a planned outage later to fix the substantive issue, you do that as a planned outage later on.

Now, I will be entirely frank with the house: if I find out or discover that there was work being done to fix a substantive issue rather than get power on as quickly as possible, I think that is not the appropriate way to have gone about the restoration of power on Yorke Peninsula on the weekend. Right now I do not have evidence that that was not done, but the more I talk to the member for Narungga the more concerned I get about what he is hearing on the ground about what occurred that day. I will be following this up not only with ElectraNet but also with the Australian Energy Regulator.

To be fair to ElectraNet, I think their executive leadership is just as concerned as we are about what occurred that day. If there haven't been helicopter cleans recently, that is concerning. If there has not been the regular cleaning and maintenance that has been done, that would be something that the regulator would have had to tick off to make sure that we could sustain a level of service.

However, the unfortunate part about regulating privatised monopolies is that the regulator works on a risk-based approach. If this was a government operation and the government ran the transmission lines, we would have had people cleaning those lines regularly. What the private sector will do is work on a risk-based approach about rain doing a lot of the work naturally and then, if there is dust, pollution monitors to work out when cleaning should be done on a risk-based approach.

I hope—and if I find evidence to the contrary I will act—that this is not on the basis of there being some type of exercise where they are collecting revenue on the basis that this cleaning is occurring and then not doing it and just pocketing it for their shareholders. I can't imagine that ElectraNet would operate that way. If they have, there are severe consequences.

I encourage the member for Narungga to continue to talk locally. Often the local information on the ground is very important, especially from people who actually work on the infrastructure, who care about the communities that they are in. I also say this: I am not here to defend ElectraNet, but I have had a lot of contact with the chief executive of ElectraNet over the last 72 hours about what has occurred at Yorke Peninsula. He is just as angry and just as upset as you and I are about what occurred, because it is unacceptable to have what occurred that weekend in that type of weather occur, and it cannot happen again.