Meeting demand growth

Despite big investments in energy infrastructure, Western Australia is still subject to major disruptions.

This was dramatically exposed in January when a fault at the North West Shelf Venture’s Karratha gas plant resulted in a sudden reduction in gas supplies in the South West.

This prompted some calls for the construction of a second gas pipeline, but that missed the point, for two reasons.

First, the problem was with the production of gas at its source, not transmission to the South West.

Second, the progressive expansion of the existing Dampier to Bunbury natural gas pipeline, which involves a process called looping, is equivalent to the construction of a second pipeline.

As well as being exposed to major disruptions, WA’s electricity network fails to meet reliability standards, a recent report by the Economic Regulation Authority (ERA) concluded.

The ERA report evaluated the performance of the state’s three electricity distributors – Western Power, regional operator Horizon Power and the Rottnest Island Authority – against several criteria, including customer connections, network reliability, street lighting, customer service and compensation payments.

It found that performance was sub-standard on most measures.

Western Power said the ERA report highlighted the challenges involved in managing one of the world’s largest isolated networks.

General manager customer services, Mark de Laeter, said Western Power had to overcome an historic period of under-spending on the network while also trying to keep up with rapid growth at a time of a severe skilled labour shortage and rising costs.

Mr de Laeter said Western Power recognised that power reliability wasn’t yet where customers wanted it to be, but the overall reliability for the network of 99.9 per cent was a solid base.

“Western Power aims for a 25 per cent improvement in reliability by 2009,” Mr de Laeter said.

“The level of growth in the network has made this target more challenging as additional resources and funding are required to meet the record growth of the South West.”