By Andrew Williams
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Western Australia’s Goldfields region has become synonymous with power outages in recent years.
Like water, electricity has a long way to travel to get to the area’s largest town, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, 600 kilometres east of Perth.
Kalgoorlie cafe worker Chloe Astill said she was not surprised when a major blackout struck the mining city on Wednesday.
She said her employers were prepared for ongoing blackouts, but it still affected business.
“Thankfully, we’ve got generators and things that can keep fridges going but, yeah, definitely [for] hospitality it’s a big hit every time,” she said.
No quick solution
Wednesday’s blackout was the third major outage in Kalgoorlie in less than two years.
In January 2024, tens of thousands of people were left without power in 40-degree summer heat.
Gas-powered backup generators across Kalgoorlie failed to kick in after a thunderstorm crumpled critical transmission infrastructure.
Eight months later, another blackout hit the area, prompting the Kalgoorlie-Boulder Mayor Glenn Wilson to call for urgent action to secure reliable power for the region.
In November, the WA government said it had secured additional backup power generation for the city through TransAlta.
It was sourced from mining giant BHP’s Nickel West operations after they were temporarily suspended.
Then in January, in the lead up to the state election, Premier Roger Cook made a commitment of a 50-megawatt, $150 million vanadium battery which “would use locally sourced and processed vanadium”.
Mr Cook said the battery would help solve Kalgoorlie’s power woes.
The battery is estimated to provide about 10 hours of backup electricity, but it will not eventuate until 2029.
Businesses ‘suck it up’
Kalgoorlie butcher shop owner Stephen McKenny felt the sting of the first two blackouts after he lost almost $70,000 worth of stock.
He was prepared with a private generator when Wednesday’s outage struck.
“It has [the generator] done its job so we’re pretty happy,” he said.
Mr Mckenny said Wednesday’s blackout was just part of life in the Goldfields.
“I think we get caught up on it like ‘it would be good if it ran all the time’, but it doesn’t,” he said.
Outage ‘unfortunate’
Western Power executive Zane Christmas said he understood the frustrations from Goldfields residents.
“It was work we couldn’t delay, it was high priority asset replacement work,” he said.
He said the provider would investigate why the backup generation failed.
“You were being supplied by a combination of state and private owned generation,” Mr Christmas said.
“There was a fault, we will investigate what the drive of that fault was that caused the trip.”
Mr Christmas said Western Power acknowledged the recent history of power outages the town had suffered.
“We’ve put a lot of effort into planning and made sure there are enough contingencies in place to get the power on as quickly as we could,” he said.
Power was restored to the more than 15,000 affected homes and businesses within two hours.
Politicians weigh in
WA Nationals leader Shane Love released a statement saying residents had the right to be frustrated.
“It’s simply not good enough,” he said.
“Families and businesses in the Goldfields have had a bloody gutful of being let down by a government that can’t deliver the basics, like keeping the lights on.”
