THE Victorian Government has been told more planning and notification will be needed if Sunraysia is to be included in any power load-shedding this summer.
Member for Mildura Ali Cupper said Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio had been briefed about the urgency for Sunraysia residents and businesses to be notified if power was to be deliberately cut, as happened early this year, due to extreme summer temperatures.
On January 25, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) instructed electricity distributors to switch off power to certain areas around the state to reduce the risk of extended, widespread blackouts.
More than 2200 Mildura customers were among those to lose power for two hours, from 12.30 to 2.30pm, as the city sweltered through a 44-degree day.
The biggest concern for Ms Cupper was power being cut to Mildura Central shopping centre without notice.
Ms Cupper said Powercor needed to ensure future planned load-shedding did not affect grids that housed potential refuges for people without power, such as Mildura Central shopping centre, The Alfred Deakin Centre and Ouyen Service Centre.
“(Ms D’Ambrosio) understood the predicament we had in the last summer, where people were going to Centro as an unofficial refuge and then unceremoniously (power) was switched off,” Ms Cupper said.
“We talked about the fact there is some capacity to discriminate between different grids within a city — so for example the hospital (grid) is always the last one to be shut down.
“If they — whether it’s Powercor or the government or AEMO — can give council, as our emergency management co-ordinators, a bit more certainty around which grids are likely to be turned off, then we can base our refuges (around that).”
AEMO last week warned more than one million Victorian households could be left without power if an early heatwave hit the state this summer, pinning the problem on a coal-fired station at Loy Yang and a gas-fired plant at Mortlake, which are both months away from being repaired.
“If both power station outages were extended over the summer, and if no additional supply was secured, involuntary load- shedding may be experienced in Victoria during extreme weather events,” AEMO said.
This could lead to between 260,000 and 1.3 million households being left without power for four hours, AEMO says.
Ms Cupper said Sunraysia residents were rightly concerned about load-shedding.
“When temperatures are what they are in this region — and this is why we are so sensitive to this — because we know that people die,” she said.
“If you’ve got a health crisis in extreme heat in Melbourne, you’ve got a worse crisis here in Mildura.
“We made sure she was very clear about that.”
