Wednesday, 9 February 2022

Lowan electorate energy supply

Ms KEALY (Lowan) (09:40): Power outages continue to cripple towns across my electorate. Yesterday more than 3000 people—Ausnet customers across Nagambie, Avenel, Seymour, Mangalore, Locksley, Kirwans Bridge and Wahring—were left without power for hours on end, and it was an unplanned outage. This unfortunately is not unusual. Three weeks ago the power was out for 6 hours and in 2019 we had a 24-hour power outage where we lost all telecommunications in the middle of soaring summer temperatures and where we had elderly people stuck at home with no air conditioning and no way of contacting loved ones. It was a complete shambles. It endangered the lives of elderly residents and ill residents in particular, and it caused local businesses to lose thousands and thousands of dollars.

I believe there needs to be a broadscale examination of this problem, and I would urge the government to actually back locals in their call to look at how these reliability problems can be solved. Communities like Nagambie cannot simply bump along not knowing when the next power outage is going to come. Concerns about how the unreliability of the network is impacting Avenel residents and a desire to do more to address climate change have led to a push by Avenel Active to undertake some of this work locally. I applaud the group for their efforts to establish a community solar-powered heat refuge for vulnerable residents. They now have a vision to make Avenel off grid, and I would urge the government to back those plans.