“Western Power welcomes the Independent Review into the Christmas 2021 Power Outages report and will carefully consider the recommendations in our continuous drive to improve services for the community.
“Western Power has already applied key learnings from the December 2021 heatwave, which impacted more the 106,000 customers.
“The power outages experienced were due to a range of factors including a three in 100-year heatwave, where temperatures exceeded 40°C for four consecutive days resulting in high electricity demand and network overloading in certain parts.
“The impact of this was exacerbated by the implementation of sensitive network settings designed to mitigate bushfire risks and delays in restoring power due to fire weather conditions.
“This unfortunately led to more and longer outages over the period.
“I want to assure the community that we’re working hard to learn from these events and improve our processes to keep the community safely connected during extreme weather events.
“Since December, we’ve updated our forecasting and network management to better cope during consecutive extreme hot weather days and this was evident during the January heatwave where near peak electricity demand was experienced with minimal power outages.
“Since December, we’ve updated our forecasting and network management to better cope during consecutive extreme hot weather days and this was evident during the January heatwave where near peak electricity demand was experienced with minimal power outages.
“The Independent Review highlights the significance of the Western Power network for the community and the need for ongoing investment in the network to maintain safety, reliability and affordable.
“Western Power is moving with the rapid pace of technology and trialling new solutions to test their suitability as part of the future network including standalone power systems and microgrids in areas where feasible.
“We’re also working to transform the network to enable our customers to better harness batteries, rooftop solar and electric vehicles, which offers more choice in generating, storing, and using energy.
“We’re already rolling out advanced meter infrastructure, which gives us more insight into usage across the network allowing us to better forecast power usage and better target our investments in areas to improve reliability.
“Western Power will work quickly to identify and implement the recommendations of the review.
“Our fault and emergency restoration crews provide an essential community service, and we’ll continue to work with the Department of Fire and Emergency Services, Bureau of Meteorology, Local Government Authorities and other agencies to reassess our restoration response during high fire weather conditions, with safety as our number one priority.”