Dunedin lines company Aurora Energy is about to begin a $5.6 million project to replace underground cables.
The company has announced work on a major upgrade to the underground electricity cables that power parts of central Dunedin will start in October.
The project would involve installing 3km of new high-voltage underground cables to take electricity from the Halfway Bush substation to its Smith St substation.
The new cables would replace existing gas-insulated cables.
The Smith St substation supplies 2,700 homes, shops and businesses in central Dunedin, in an area from the Octagon to Highgate.
The project is expected to take about ten months to complete and is part of Aurora Energy’s long term renewal of its electricity network.
The new cable route will run from the Halfway Bush substation down Taieri Rd, up and over Stuart Street, and end at the Smith St Substation.
Trenching work would begin next week to install underground ducting, starting at the Halfway Bush end near the Wakari Dog Park.
Once the underground ducting was in place, the electricity cables would be pulled through the ducting in sections, joined together and then connected into the network.
The project was expected to be completed by June next year.
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Totally awesome for Dunedin, and whats better, things like this are planned and planned well in advance, so they will already have the coin set aside and it will not cost the rate payers a cent. Aye Aurora Energy, just think that $600,000 of the 5.6 million was the old CEO's bonus or was he from Delta?
Ah.... Not quite Rtn2Dun, someone might take you seriously. In 2016 / 2017 Aurora borrowed $40,000,000, you and I guarantee that money, and the other $300,000,000 that they owe, as ratepayers. I'd love to be able to tell you what they borrowed last year, but they haven't published their annual report - even though we are running up to the months after the close of the financial year.
Of course we all pay for the mistakes Aurora make in our line charges as well. We also miss out on the dividends we might expect from our investment in the company. Kind of a triple whammy. Having said that, it is good to see this seriously degraded cable, which has failed multiple times in the last few years, finally replaced.