Central Highlands community frustrated after being left in the dark

After suffering heavily from power outages and storm damage following extreme weather last year, Trentham residents have regularly lost power throughout the first two months of the year, with some estimating about eight outages this year.

Blackwood, Tylden and the surrounding areas have also been affected by the unplanned power outages, with eight major faults on the main powerline that supplies the area so far this year.

However, some of those eight outages were caused by storms and lightning the region experienced during January.

Hepburn Shire Coliban ward councillor Brian Hood, who lives in Trentham, said the community was fed up with the constant interruptions which usually last for hours at a time.

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"I think most people would accept and understand that, in particularly extreme weather conditions, there can be unplanned outages, but the last two over the last week, there's been no high winds, no storms, very little if any rain. There's no obvious explanation to the average resident as to why the power should be going out," he said.

"They're very frequent, they're extremely annoying and very, very disruptive. A lot of people, besides living their normal day-to-day life, are trying to work from home and, frankly, it's just not good enough.

"It's not acceptable. There's obviously some sort of serious deficiencies in the reliability of the network and it has to be fixed and fixed quickly."

Cr Hood said the situation had become somewhat of a running joke within the town, but one that was masking the community's deep frustration with the outages.

"It's extremely frustrating. Very annoying, mostly because of the frequency of them. If it happened once in a while and there was a good reason for it, then people are pretty tolerant and understanding of that sort of thing, but people are getting really annoyed," he said.

"It's becoming a bit of a running joke. I guess people try to cope with these sorts of things through a bit of dark humour, but underlying that is a sense of frustration and deep annoyance that it's highly disruptive, not only to residents living their normal day to day life of working from home, but for businesses and it just it just makes things completely unreliable."

A Powercor spokeswoman said the distributor was aware of the impact of the outages on the community.

"We understand how frustrating this is for our customers and want to assure them we are doing everything we can to identify and address what is causing these outages," the spokeswoman said.

"This work includes conducting detailed patrols of more than 200 kilometres of high-voltage powerlines that stretch through some heavily vegetated areas to identify what may be causing these outages. Crews will be looking for items such as bark, vegetation, wildlife or damage to our equipment.

"We have patrolled more than 60 per cent of this line and will continue these patrols as we work to identify the underlying cause of these outages."

The spokeswoman also said the faults were not caused by Rapid Earth Fault Current Limiter devices.

"REFCL technology does not cause faults. They are safety devices that help respond to faults or other problems on the network," the spokeswoman said.

"During fire season, the REFCLs and other network safety devices operate in more sensitive setting modes. When they activate, they are doing their job in helping keep communities safe by reducing the risk of fires starting from our assets.

"The fire season declared by the CFA is currently still in place. Once the fire season is over, the network safety devices will operate in a less sensitive setting and so may activate less often in response to faults."

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