Tuesday, 1 April 2025

Electricity infrastructure

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (03:35): (1550) My adjournment tonight – or this morning, I should say, at 25 to 4 – is for the attention of the Minister for Energy and Resources, and it concerns the option of early fault detectors on our electricity system. We all remember Black Saturday, the terrible devastation, the loss of life and the significance of Victoria’s many tens of thousands of kilometres – almost 30,000 kilometres – of rural single-wire earth return powerlines, which played a significant role in sparking the bushfires. Since that time nine years of trials partly funded by the government have recommended the full-scale rollout of EFDs across the state to protect Victoria’s rural communities from catastrophic powerline fires such as the 2009 Kilmore East–Kinglake fire, which was sparked by a faulty SWER fire and was a significant component in the loss of life at that time in 2009.

The recent trial of EFDs picked up 23 faults over 1100 kilometres of SWER lines, including live wires in contact with wooden poles, rusted-out tie wires, loose conductors and clamps and so forth. But the difficulty is there is a regulatory hole here that has not been dealt with and not been pushed forward in a sensible way by the state government. Some say the state government needs to mandate a rollout, and neither Powercor nor AusNet are able to gain Australian Energy Regulator approval to recover the cost of installing EFDs developed and manufactured indeed in Richmond in Victoria here by the firm IND Technology – and they are a very impressive firm, I might say. AusNet proposed spending $8 million as part of its approach, but that has not been able to be done because of these particular issues. The Australian Energy Regulator even counted the benefits, it said in a recent article, of climate change, but not public safety in rural areas.

I note the Minister for Energy and Resources has dodged questions on this, with her office stating that:

distribution businesses are required to minimise bushfire risk on their networks under the (Victorian) Electricity Safety Act 1998 which can include early fault detection technology …

which is quite true.

What she needs to do, though, is explain to the community why she will not move on this important set of safety measures. If there is some good reason that is escaping everyone else, we need to hear that. She could even consider a very short, sharp approach which analyses this independently and comes back with an answer, but we need to take steps on this for the safety of our community.