About 20,000 people in Broken Hill and surrounding communities in far western New South Wales were left for more than a week without power, after a major windstorm on October 17 brought down seven electricity transmission towers.
The region then suffered from because one back-up diesel generator was offline, and the other failed due to demand.
Recriminations and counter recriminations have been levelled at private energy companies Transgrid and AGL, owners of the Broken Hill Battery Energy Storage System, which is have a backup.
It has since emerged that AGL had disabled it, , but under mounting pressure, was .
Broken Hill Mayor Tom Kennedy alleged the generators were not maintained adequately. Labor Premier Chris Minns blamed the former Coalition government for privatising the electricity assets. The Coalition asked why the second generator had been offline.
why, with wind and solar farms near-by, they could not access energy.
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) and the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) are investigating whether Transgrid breached its obligations or licence requirements.
If found liable, it could be fined up to 10% of its annual turnover, estimated to be up to $90 million. IPART can issue fines of up to $250,000 for breaches, or it could change Transgrid’s licence conditions.
Transgrid was established as a statutory authority by the Electricity Commission of NSW in 1995, when the deregulation/privatisation process began. Kristina Keneally’s Labor government controversially sold the energy retail arm in 2010 for $5.3 billion, but kept electricity infrastructure in public hands.
The Coalition sold Transgrid for $10.3 billion in 2016 to a consortium, comprising a Canadian pension fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and local infrastructure funds.
Electrical Trades Union NSW/ACT Secretary of poor maintenance. He said power workers have long said “Broken Hill’s power supply was a disaster waiting to happen”.
He said Transgrid’s less frequent maintenance work “means more events like this are possible”. He accused the company of “greed and incompetence,” saying it was putting the lives of the people of Broken Hill at risk.
Essential energy and Transgrid workers from all over the state have been helping get power back up in Broken Hill.
said on October 29 she had heard reports the network infrastructure was “practically disintegrating”.
Transgrid made more than $1.12 billion in the last financial year, but the real wages of Transgrid workers have declined by 10.3% since 2015.
The Greens want a parliamentary inquiry into the “circumstances of this colossal failure”.
said governments cannot escape responsibility for delivering essential services, such as electricity, even in a fully privatised system. He pointed to the South Australian 2016 black-out, a system failure, in which the government “re-entered the electricity business” and sought Tesla’s help to construct the world’s first big battery.
He said as responsibility for energy is shared between private transmission, distribution and generation companies, the Australian Energy Market Operator and the AER, the energy market is “more prone to failures”.
Quiggin said that all aspects of the market energy system need to be reconsidered, “beginning with the privatisation of monopoly assets, such as transmission and distribution”.
“Returning these assets to public ownership would allow for a return to a more integrated electricity supply industry.”
His view is that a public operator would continue to own the poles and wires but the mix of “base load”, “peak” and “reserve” energy supply market “would be partially replaced by long-term power purchase agreements”, which include an obligation on private companies to provide continuity of service and system stability.
While Quiggin is not arguing for public ownership, he did say that “re-nationalisation is perfectly within the financial capacity of Australian governments” because it is a “low-risk” asset.
The record speaks for itself: NSW governments should never have sold publicly-owned power assets.
As Hicks said of the Broken Hill power failure: “This is what happens when you outsource essential infrastructure to a private company that cares more about its bottom line than actually delivering for the people … This isn’t a case of bad luck — this is a case of incompetence and calculated greed.”