In its drive to provide greater information to the community, Western Power has added new reliability and planned work information to its website.
Western Power Growth Executive Ben Stanton said the new web page would deliver greater transparency for the business’ 2.3 million customers and followed the Independent Review into Christmas Outages.
“Part of our work in implementing the review’s recommendations includes improving the way we communicate with the community and key stakeholders regarding reliability,” he said.
“The new web page provides reliability and mitigation work information for locations that are experiencing outages more frequently, the reasons why, and what we are doing to address these issues.”
The data driven page features a detailed map showing feeders in the relevant local government locations, the average total duration of power interruptions, the frequency of outages, maps to indicate scale of network in local government area, and a list of network infrastructure types and functionality.
“Areas that generally experience power reliability issues are located in regional parts of the network where infrastructure such as long feeder lines are more subject to weather events.
“Where feasible, we’re implementing more appropriate solutions in these areas such as stand-alone power systems and microgrids to improve reliability.”
Mr Stanton said the website update was one of several improvements being made this year to communicate and engage with the community and stakeholders such as local governments.
“We understand the inconvenience repeated or prolonged outages can cause, particularly in regional and remote areas of the South West Interconnected Network [WA’s main electricity grid],” he said.
“We’ve applied multiple key learnings from previous experience and undertaken significant engagement with the community to get their feedback and insight.
“This website enhancement is one way we can provide transparent information and assure the community we’re learning and improving from last summer to keep the community safely connected and informed during extreme weather events.
“We’re striving to be one of the most transparent energy utilities in Australia and publishing our network reliability data online is part of this.”
