We work hard to ensure all our customers have a reliable power supply so they can keep the lights on and their houses warm.
Unfortunately, we know that some areas of our network don’t perform as well as we want them to, so we’ve come up with plans to improve our customers’ supply in these areas. Targeting underperforming areas improves network safety and reliability for all our customers.
To do this, we monitor our electricity network for areas that have unexpected faults and outages. For areas with the most faults and outages, we plan projects and maintenance work to improve the condition of our assets and reduce the negative effects on our customers.
For each region of our network, we have dedicated teams made up of people from across our business as well as our field service providers. Together, this ‘working group’ reviews the worst performing areas of our network and considers what could be potentially causing the issues. From this, they come up with a solution that can involve vegetation management and overhead renewals, as well as initiatives such as installing line fault indicators, which allow us to pinpoint any faults on the network so our field crews can fix them as quickly as possible.
To prioritise this work for our worst-served customers and plan when we make these upgrades, we take into account factors like the number of defects, faults and unplanned outages in each area.
This process is under constant review and, when required, a project can be prioritised outside the current plan, such as if assets are at the end of their life, as we did in Hunterville. This means we can remedy any urgent defect or outage as quickly as possible, rather than waiting to add it into our planned works programme for the year.
