Chris Minns is flying to Broken Hill after a storm left about 20,000 people without power and put pressure on the energy operator Transgrid to explain why it did not have a backup plan to prevent the outage.
The New South Wales premier will meet affected residents on Thursday after announcing an inquiry and declaring a natural disaster to unlock emergency relief funding for the outback town and surrounding communities.
Severe weather including a possible tornado knocked down seven transmission towers on the power line into Broken Hill last week, which left it and other towns including Wilcannia and Menindee with only intermittent electricity.
On Wednesday Minns said people living in the state’s far west had been let down by the previous Coalition state government’s decision to privatise its electricity assets and hand control of them to Transgrid.
The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal on Wednesday began its inquiry into Transgrid’s compliance with its regulatory obligations. It said it was not yet clear whether the company had breached its licence conditions.
Broken Hill’s mayor, Tom Kennedy, said Transgrid had failed to ensure confidence in the electricity grid. He accused the company of taking a “gamble” to save money by not upgrading the region’s two backup gas generators.
“One was broken and they knew it was broken,” he told the ABC on Wednesday. “The other one obviously wasn’t maintained well enough and that kicked out yesterday – that resulted in no power at all for up to 36 hours for some people.”
The region’s only working emergency large-scale generator, which can run on gas or diesel, failed in hot weather on Monday and was not able to be switched on again until Tuesday.
Minns said the region’s other emergency generator had not been operational since last November.
Transgrid initially declined to comment when Guardian Australia asked about the concerns raised by Minns and Kennedy. However, late on Wednesday, the company disputed the claims.
“The generator currently out of service in Broken Hill was operational before being taken offline for refurbishment in September 2024,” a Transgrid spokesperson said.
“Claims that it has been out of service since November 2023 are not correct.”
Transgrid said crews were working “around the clock” to repair the storm-damaged power line and restore permanent electricity supply to the region.
“Power is currently being supplied to the region by a large-scale backup generator,” the spokesperson said.
The premier’s criticism of Transgrid prompted a fierce debate in the NSW parliament about privatisation, with the opposition insisting it was up to the government to explain why the region’s second backup generator had been offline.
Minns will be accompanied on his Broken Hill trip by the independent Barwon MP, Roy Butler, who praised residents for supporting one another.
“There’s a lot of really good people doing really good things,” he said. “But we’re still in a tenuous situation because there’s no guarantee the second generator will keep working.”
A Broken Hill steel manufacturer, Scott Campbell, said he had been “blown away” when other business owners and electricians banded together to service and deliver a generator to his daughter’s sandwich and pastry shop to stop her from having to waste food.
He said the town’s second emergency generator had “been sitting there offline, not functional” since November.
The power line had failed once before, Campbell said, and he hoped the government used this disaster as an opportunity to upgrade the line to export more of the solar and wind energy generated in Broken Hill.
“I’m really hoping that a positive thing will come out of it,” he said.
Abigail Hughes’ coffee shop, Giovanni & Co, had to shut for three days and throw out produce as it went without power.
“It is hard to recover as a small business financially,” Hughes said. “The business supports me and my family, and 12 other staff … We provide quite a few people with a living wage.”
Hughes resorted to buying two small generators herself to power her equipment – “another added cost”, she said.
“Questions need to be answered on why does one big town and surrounding towns only have one generator?” she said. “Why are the backup generators not maintained properly? Why are we only receiving aid now?”
But she said the community was “getting together and picking themselves up by the bootstraps”, something Broken Hill “is really good at”.
A public servant in Wilcannia, who requested anonymity, said the small, predominantly Indigenous town had suffered as a result of the outage.
One school had been left without power because only the central school had its own generator. Students had also missed classes because they were worried about their hygiene as they were unable to shower.
“Some families have been dipping into their food budget to buy generators so they can at least have electricity,” they said. “So there has been a choice between food or electricity.”
The public servant said Wilcannia had experienced a power outage three years ago and the government had treated it “like it never happened”. More support and better information needed to be provided this time around, they said.
“Some members of the community are … frustrated with the idea of Australia spending millions of dollars on a royal family visit when places like Wilcannia don’t have roads [or] basic infrastructure needs met and haven’t ever [had them].”
Transgrid said on Thursday the temporary electricity supply “remains complex” and warned people to expect further outages.
“From time to time, outages can occur in localised parts of the region to enable the bulk of the supply to the community to continue, particularly during the evening peak,” a spokesperson said.
“Both Transgrid and Essential Energy have crews onsite to rapidly respond to issues as they occur and minimise impacts.”
Transgrid said it was working to install extra generators and a transformer that had arrived in Broken Hill – and would commission four additional generators on Thursday.
