For the first time the Commerce Commission has published summaries of the performances of each of the country’s 29 electricity lines companies, covering the year ended March 31, 2016. In a press release commissioner Stephen Gale said the summaries the commission published were "a high-level snapshot" and did not offer a "detailed picture of performance" but were intended to "help improve lines companies’ overall performance".
"[The summaries] suggest some differences between the performances of different lines companies, such as the health of assets including poles, lines and substation equipment," Dr Gale said.
Network Waitaki chief executive Graham Clark yesterday said asset replacement was an ongoing focus for the community-owned electricity lines company, and would remain a focus because the company was "not actually profit driven".
"We’re actually owned by the community, so if we have to charge a bit more, or do things a little bit different, it’s actually the consumers who are benefiting from it, because the money is being spent on their assets, for their benefit, and it’s not being siphoned off for the shareholders somewhere else," Mr Clark said.
He said these assets were being replaced and this could well accelerate over the next few years because more assets were coming to the end of their lives.
The Waitaki network was established in the 1960s and 1970s, and the company was working through its assets management plan, he said. The company did have some ageing infrastructure, but it spent about $1million on pole replacement last year, for example.
While "some of our assets may be ageing . . . they’re not falling over".
The company spent about $8million on its assets last year, and had spent about the same for the last several years. Mr Clark said these days a challenge for the company was around safety "when working on our network".
"Health and safety of our staff is paramount, but we used to do a lot of work ‘live line’," he said.
"It’s how you actually do the maintenance that’s required and minimise the impact on our consumers in terms of outages and things — that is a big focus of ours at the moment."
The one-sheet document published on the Commerce Commission’s website shows Network Waitaki experienced 160 unplanned and 211 planned interruptions in the year.
