Northern Rivers politicians have slammed Transgrid, the high voltage electricity transmission network operator and manager, and the Australian Energy Market Operator after more than 24,000 customers across the region were left with power last week for more than 3 hours on one of the coldest nights of the year.

Power went out as people were cooking dinner at 6.20pm on July 8, in a large area from Mullumbimby to Ballina and Alstonville, and west to Lismore, Casino, and Kyogle, and didn’t return to some homes until almost 11pm.

On the night of the outage, MPs at both State and Federal level told their social media followers the outage was due to load shedding.

Energy retailer Origin states load shedding is a last resort measure that distributors enact to balance supply and demand of electricity across the National Electricity Market which is used when there’s not enough power supply to meet the demand of electricity within the country, or states, and the grid may become unstable.

To avoid the risk of instability, which can cause damage to essential infrastructure in the electricity grid, the Australian Energy Market Operator AEMO makes the decision on how much electricity consumption needs to be reduced and distributors determine how their portion of the load will be shed across their network to help balance demand.

State Member for Clarence, Richie Williamson, and Federal Member for Page, Kevin Hogan both called for answers as to why the Northern Rivers was the region chosen to load shed electricity.

Mr Williamson said early reports suggest issues with a major transmission line owned by Transgrid started the blackouts, but questions remain unanswered as to why the Northern Rivers was targeted to shed power.

The CV Independent asked Transgrid what caused the outage, why was the Northern Rivers area chosen to shed power from, how likely was it for this event to reoccur, and what advice they had for customers so they can avoid a similar event in the future.

A Transgrid spokesperson told the CV Independent the company was ordered by the AEMO to load shed electricity supplies to the region.

“At 6.20pm on July 8 the Australian Energy Market Operator instructed Transgrid to shed 30MW of energy in the Lismore region,” the spokesperson said.

“This resulted in Essential Energy carrying out load shedding to 24,500 customers.

“Transgrid worked closely with AEMO to restore the majority of power by 8.02pm, with the full load restored by 10pm.”

Transgrid and Essential Energy apologised to their customers for the inconvenience and said the issue that led to the outage had been rectified.

“The outage was the result of a network constraint on a transmission line exacerbated by increased customer demand during the night-time peak, and wider network issues outside of Transgrid’s direct control,” the spokesperson said.

“Load shedding was necessary to ensure the safe operation of the network.

“Specialist crews from Transgrid replaced insulators on its transmission line between Coffs Harbour and Lismore at a remote location adjacent to Tallawudjah Nature Reserve, 30km south of Grafton.”

This article appeared in the  Clarence Valley Independent, 17 July 2024.