Energy Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson says she is willing to consider doubling extended outage payment

WA’s Energy Minister says she is willing to “consider” doubling the extended outage payment available to tens of thousands of Mid West households and businesses impacted by last weekend’s mass blackout. At its peak, the outage left almost 25,000 customers in the Mid West and 115,000 across WA without power — most had their electricity back on within 24 hours, while others were forced to wait longer. Storms knocked out 20 transmission lines from the main transmission line from Three Springs into Geraldton on Saturday night. Bushfires caused power outages in other parts of the Mid West and Wheatbelt, which as of Thursday was still impacting about 850 customers in Eneabba, Warradarge, Arrowsmith East, Red Gully and Mogumber. In Parliament this week, Geraldton MLA Kirrilee Warr asked Energy Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson whether the Cook Government would double the extended outage payment to $240 per affected customer, as it did last time there was a similar emergency last year. “Some households (were) left without power for many hours and in some cases multiple days during a heatwave in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, just days before Christmas,” Ms Warr said. “With families losing hundreds of dollars worth of food and essentials at the worst possible time of year, will the Government provide additional emergency relief to those affected?” The existing extended outage payment available is $120, if a customer is affected for more than 12 consecutive hours. In response, Ms Sanderson said she was “happy to take that suggestion under consideration”, acknowledging it was a “long”, “hot” and “uncomfortable” day for people in Geraldton and the Mid West. “Obviously, there are processes that we have to go through that do that, so I want to thank the community for their patience,” she said. A Western Power spokesperson on Thursday said they had received a total of 18,583 extended outage payment claims so far — 14,225 of which had been approved, with the remainder in processing stages. Ms Sanderson said the government was “always assessing the suitability of assistance measures like extended outage payments, which were introduced by a Labor government in the 2000s and are intended to be an acknowledgement of the inconvenience caused by these types of events.” The minister said the power network came up against an “extraordinary event”, the most extreme weather incident impacting the State’s power infrastructure since the 2010 hailstorm. “In an increasingly warming climate we are seeing more and more extreme weather events,” she said. “It is incredibly challenging when we have these events but we work closely with all our emergency services and agencies to make sure that communities get back online.”