Customers who have suffered through Broken Hill’s mass outages are set for a temporary reprieve on their bills as locals continue to be hit with night-time power cuts in sweltering conditions.
Two power companies – Origin and EnergyAustralia – have agreed to defer bills to those who have been affected by the outages that crippled the region for the better part of a week.
Customers won’t receive free electricity, but won’t be hit with a bill for a minimum of 30 days and the companies will not chase outstanding debts.
The government had already announced a support package entitling residential electricity account holders to $200 payments, while small and medium businesses can get $400.
The energy minister, Penny Sharpe, called on smaller providers to also look after customers.
“There’s questions about whether you’ll be charged for your solar and for all of those fixed costs … we’re working through those issues,” she said.
“But I have asked all of the retailers to make sure that people aren’t charged for electricity that they weren’t able to use.”
Broken Hill went a fifth straight night without an outage on Tuesday, but about 1,800 customers in surrounding towns lost power for 90 minutes.
The outages have followed severe thunderstorms on 17 October that damaged power lines, with dodgy backup generators leaving 20,000 locals with on-and-off power.
Repeated brownouts, particularly throughout the evening peak, occurred when electricity supplied by multiple generators was unable to meet demand.
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But officials confirmed swift progress on reconnecting the region to the national grid meant it was likely to be online by Saturday rather than next Wednesday.
Workers have been scrambling to fix a 3.5km section of transmission line damaged in the storm.
“We are now working through the process of tensioning, securing and testing the lines that supply mains power to far west NSW,” the Transgrid representative Sam Pickering said.
Sharpe would not be drawn on the Broken Hill mayor Tom Kennedy’s suggestion that Transgrid should be fined millions of dollars if an investigation found its backup generators were faulty.
“I know the mayor is very interested in all of this … we’ll continue to work through that, but that’s going to take a little while,” she said.
