10 March – Powercor identifies potential cause of multiple outages in Central Highlands and Macedon Ranges

Powercor crews believe they may have found the cause of multiple power outages in Macedon Ranges and the Central Highlands.

Yesterday, crews inspected and replaced a variety of items – lighting surge arrestors, fuses, insulators, and high-voltage leads – on seven high-voltage power poles along Martin Street South in Blackwood.

After careful examination of these items, crews found an insulator that had visible burn marks indicating a fault had occurred. This is consistent with what our engineering teams expected to be found from the type of fault believed to have caused the outages.

Customers in the area have experienced seven unplanned outages since 23 February.

The insulator has now been replaced and taken back to the Ballarat depot for further studies.

No power outages occurred in the area last night.

However, to be certain there are no other faults occurring, we are continuing to test the network.  Crews will be closely monitoring while these tests occur and will be available to respond quickly if issues occur.

These results follow work conducted over the past 11 days which narrowed down the issue on the more than 260-kilometre line, to just a 20-kilometre section and then finally a 400m section in Blackwood.

We want to thank customers for their continued patience during this process. We understand the impact and frustration caused by multiple outages over a short period of time.

We will be continuing to update customers with any new developments.

Customers can also call us on 13 22 06.