Transpower speeds upgrade work as infrastructure takes priority

By Pattrick Smellie

Thursday 12th February 2009

Transpower will speed up 10 years' worth of small-scale maintenance and upgrades, the national grid's chief executive Patrick Strange announced today.

The decision reflects "major cost savings and synergies in doing the work as part of one programme," Stange said. The announcement will be seen as a part of a programme of prudent commitment to accelerate infrastructure spending to counter the economic recession, and follows this week's packaging by the Government of $483.7 million in education, state housing and roading projects.

The $50 million programme is in addition to more than $3.8 billion in grid reinforcement projects already under way, and will concentrate on tower maintenance, civil work and substation maintenance, much of it in rural New Zealand.

Large parts of Auckland were blacked out last week when a critical transformer failed during routine Transpower maintenance. On that occasion, Transpower had chosen to run the grid at a lower level of security than the operational standard, known as "n-1."

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