The Australian Energy Regulator today issued the Victorian Electricity Distribution Businesses Comparative Report 2008.
The report presents the 2008 financial and service quality performance of Victoria's five electricity Distribution Network Service Providers: CitiPower, Jemena Electricity Networks, Powercor, SP AusNet, and United Energy Distribution. The report also provides details of the businesses' performance trends since 1999.
AER chair Steve Edwell said the report aims to provide transparency about the financial and service quality performance of the distributors by comparing and encouraging businesses to improve their performance relative to other network businesses.
The key findings for 2008 are:
all distributors reported higher return on their regulated assets in 2008 than was forecast by the regulator
while the distributors were severely impacted by the 2 April 2008 storm, which resulted in the highest level of customer minutes-off-supply since 1996, if the effects of this extreme event are excluded there is an under-lying trend of improvement to the state-wide average reliability of supply, and
there has also been a gradual downward trend in the number of supply interruptions per customer.
The 2 April storm resulted in interruptions of electricity supply to 655,000 customers, just over 20 per cent of all customers. Because of this storm, the state-wide average outage time in 2008 was the highest on record since 1994.
Discounting the effect of the 2 April storm, the state-wide minutes-off-supply was substantially lower than the 2007 figures. All distributors achieved better than target level performance in minutes off supply.
Notwithstanding the long-term trend of improving average reliability, pockets of lower supply reliability continued to persist in rural areas, particularly for customers connected to low reliability rural feeders. While the 2 April storm did have some impact on rural feeders, the level of under performance for rural feeders remained significant in 2008, even if the effect of the 2 April storm were discounted. The AER will continue to monitor the service level to these customers.
This report is a continuation of a series of distribution service performance reports previously published by the Essential Services Commission of Victoria, after the transfer of economic regulation function from the ESCV to the AER in January 2009.