It’s Friday morning 14th March 2025 and a quick review at the Energex Outage finder shows that we’re down to ‘only’ ~17,000 customers off supply:
… most of these are down on the Gold Coast, and we see from the map these are inland, where I presume there’s more vegetation and including locations where road access might have been damaged via TC Alfred (not TC Albert, sorry):
I have not looked in northern NSW, but readers should also not forget that there would also be customers still off supply there.
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
Because not all have access to Anthony Cornelius’ updates on LinkedIn, but many are interested in TC Alfred, I have shared Anthony’s update from Friday morning 7th March 2025 here.
The AEMO notes that, at 06:12 (NEM time) on Friday 7th March 2025 various 132kV lines between Lismore and Mullumbimby tripped, along with No 1 and 2 cables of Directlink. This follows localised distribution network outages overnight in northern NSW (Essential Energy distribution area) due to TC Alfred.
It’s Sunday morning 9th March 2025 and a reference to the Energex Outage Map shows many more orange splotches denoting unplanned outages (by virtue of ex-TC Alfred).
Thanks to the tireless work of Energex we had power restored two days earlier than first predicted. We are so grateful for there massive effort after cyclone Alfred.
You can really see the limitations on fault tracking caused by the lack of smart meters in QLD. The lack of data from smart meters means that Energex is only making guesses on where many of the outages are, and the related impact. Simplistically this can be seen by the many overlapping areas, but also by the fault zones not following street patterns. I looked up where I used to live to look at the outage impact and it was very clear to me that this was the case.
Thanks to the tireless work of Energex we had power restored two days earlier than first predicted. We are so grateful for there massive effort after cyclone Alfred.
You can really see the limitations on fault tracking caused by the lack of smart meters in QLD. The lack of data from smart meters means that Energex is only making guesses on where many of the outages are, and the related impact. Simplistically this can be seen by the many overlapping areas, but also by the fault zones not following street patterns. I looked up where I used to live to look at the outage impact and it was very clear to me that this was the case.