The meetings were prompted by unplanned outages across the AusNet network, in areas such as Nagambie, Longwood, Euroa and Violet Town, as well as by outages in the wider Benalla area which left more than 2500 households without power.
Ms Cleeland said that while improvements had been made, there was still lots of work to be done to ensure residents had reliable power in the region.
“While a series of upgrades have been implemented, there are still too many days where our towns are left without power,” Ms Cleeland said.
“This is incredibly frustrating for everyone that is affected by the outages and it is imperative that improvements continue to happen.”
Ms Cleeland said households and businesses in the region had suffered due to the outages.
“People have been left unable to contact loved ones, unable to operate electric medical equipment and unable to keep their homes at an appropriate temperature during extreme weather,” Ms Cleeland said.
“Meanwhile, businesses have had to close, lost considerable stock as refrigerators are left without power, and been forced into purchasing expensive generators just to operate.”
Despite these unplanned outages, Ms Cleeland said she was pleased to discover in her meetings with AusNet representatives that a $22 million project to install a second power line in the region was now awaiting approval from the Australian Energy Regulator.
“I was also pleased to hear of AusNet’s commitment to significantly improving their community and stakeholder engagement as a means of creating more transparency around outages, including response times, causes and when people can expect their power to return,” Ms Cleeland said.
“Improving the power reliability in our region remains one of my highest priorities in this role and I will continue to regularly meet with AusNet to ensure this happens.”
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