I welcome the opportunity to comment on recent articles published in the Bay Post about community issues being caused by a colony of grey-headed flying foxes roosting in the Eurobodalla Shire.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
As you are aware, Essential Energy has experienced ongoing problems since mid-April with the flying foxes contacting powerlines, activating network protection equipment and causing power outages. In response to one network fault, our crews found and removed 20 electrocuted bats from powerlines.
The flying fox activity is occurring across a large geographic area between Batemans Bay and Narooma and is not isolated to any individual section of the electricity network. This has resulted in customers experiencing intermittent power outages in areas including Tomakin, Rosedale, Malua Bay and Surf Beach in recent weeks.
Essential Energy is working closely with Eurobodalla Shire Council and the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage to understand the behavioural patterns of the colony of grey-headed flying foxes, which is believed to be significant in number.
While Essential Energy is unable to guarantee a continuous power supply for customers, we have implemented a series of operational changes in an attempt to mitigate the frequency of power outages caused by the flying fox activity near the network.
This has included re-configuring a section of the local electricity network that has been susceptible to outages to supply power from an alternative direction to try to minimise the number of customers affected.
Crews are patrolling the affected powerlines several times a day as well as carrying out night-time patrols to identify any network issues caused by the flying fox activity and complete repairs as necessary.
Essential Energy has also altered its on-call roster arrangements to increase the geographic area covered by its local fault and emergency teams to improve response times to power outages caused by the flying foxes.
We appreciate that the number of power outages caused by flying foxes contacting the local electricity network in recent weeks has inconvenienced customers in the Eurobodalla Shire.
Please be assured that we will continue to monitor the situation and implement measures to mitigate the frequency of power outages caused by the flying fox colony while working co-operatively with local and state government representatives on the issue.
