It was the week before Christmas in 2009 when Anne Voss, a microbiologist at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, smelt a rat.
Dr Voss saw a notice pinned to the wire gate of the electricity terminal across the street from her house in Brunswick. It was a planning application, flagging “Maintenance works and upgrades”.
This innocuous development notice turned out to be an upgrade alright. Voss conducted some elementary research and soon found her fellow residents of Brunswick Street were to have 12 spanking new pylons, each 26 metres tall, on their doorsteps. “There was no letter from council", she says.
News of the towering forest of steel spread through the neighbourhood like a 40,000 volt shock through an electric circuit, setting in train a tortuous two-year process of objections and local resident rallies which have now culminated in an investigation by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) into overspending.
Although demand for electricity in Australia is actually falling, power bills are poised to spiral again this year at double-digit rates in every state. And it is network costs – not the carbon tax (although that is a factor) – which are the principal culprit behind the surge in prices.
Against this backdrop, and mounting concern that the power companies are “gold-plating” their networks – because the more money they spend, the more money they make - AER chairman Andrew Reeves told BusinessDay last week that the energy regulator was looking at whether SP Ausnet might have built its Melbourne power terminal more cheaply elsewhere.
This is the third investigation of this sort by the AER. It follows similar inquiries into overspending by transmission giants Transgrid in NSW and Powerlink Queensland.
Forget school stimulus wastage
Power industry insiders say that the gold-plating of the National Electricity Market (NEM) puts the controversial schools stimulus program in the shade. And it is not all taxpayers who get hit evenly, but pensioners in wintertime when they open that quarterly envelope to find a bill they can ill afford to pay.
