Nationals Member for Euroa Annabelle Cleeland has continued to discuss local power outages in Parliament as she pushes for greater investment in local energy infrastructure.
Speaking on a renewable energy bill in Parliament this week, Ms Cleeland said regional communities were still being left in the dark as outages continue across the electorate.
“While I understand the need for addressing emissions and renewable energy targets in our state, there still remains far too many concerns with energy supply and reliability, particularly in regional areas like my electorate,” Ms Cleeland said.
“It was incredibly unfortunate seeing much of our state left without power following extreme weather recently.
“While this has had an enormous impact on people right across Victoria, this has been what parts of my electorate like Euroa, Longwood, Violet Town, Ruffy, Nagambie, and Strathbogie have been dealing with for over four months now.”
Residents in some of the worst-hit towns in the region say they experienced up to 80 hours of power outages in January and December, with cuts ranging from minutes to well over 24 hours long.
“For the past few months, the outages in my region cannot be blamed on the weather,” Ms Cleeland said.
“There have been outages when it’s cold, outages when it’s hot, outages when it’s dry, outages when it’s wet, outages when it’s windy, and outages when it’s calm and still.
“While I acknowledge that poor weather has caused outages across the state, in my region this is more than just a weather issue.”
Many of the issues in the Euroa region can be traced back to there being a single line of supply running from Benalla to Violet Town through to Euroa and spreading out across the surrounding localities.
Despite the fact that this supply line has been known as the most problematic in the state since the 1970s, nothing has been done to correct the problem.
“Upgrading this infrastructure is essential and will go a long way to preventing the frequency of these outages,” Ms Cleeland said.
“People’s health and safety, their ability to operate a business, and their general wellbeing are all significantly compromised when there is a lack of reliable power.”
