Power lines company Horizon Energy has been warned and another, Unison Networks, has been issued with compliance advice by the Commerce Commission after an “excessive” number of power outages in 2017 and 2018.
Horizon services 24,000 customers in the Eastern Bay of Plenty while Unison services more than 112,000 customers in Hawke’s Bay, Rotorua and Taupō.
The Commission said both companies had contravened network quality standards through the outages.
The investigation into Horizon Energy found two aspects where Horizon failed to meet good industry practice, particularly after quality standards were compromised in the Bay of Plenty region of Galatea over a five-year issue with reliability.
The first point of concern related to the Galatea outage, including the township of Murupara, which affected more than 1,700 customers in April 2016.
“This outage was most probably caused by lightning. However, our view is that Horizon’s failure to address this part of the network’s reduced reliability with sufficient urgency, played a concerning role in its contravention of our quality standards.
"This is especially the case as these reliability issues had persisted since 2011,” Commission deputy chair Sue Begg said.
As a regulated monopoly under the Commerce Act, Horizon is subject to quality standards which set annual limits for the average number and duration of power outages that consumers experience on its network.
As part of its reporting obligations, Horizon disclosed to the Commission that it contravened its quality standards in the year ending 31 March 2018.
Unison Networks' compliance advice was issued after outages between 2015 and 2018.
The Commission found it failed to conduct a post-event review after a major disruption in March 2018, which resulted from a fault on one of Unison’s feeders. In addition it was found there there had been an increase in the number of equipment failure related outages on Unison’s network since 2015.
Both networks were issued a warning letter after an investigation which included site visits to inspect the network, as well as the review of information provided by Horizon and independent opinion of engineering experts.
Further breaches of quality standards could result in a penalty of up to $5,000,000, the Commission said.
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