Sp Ausnet Half year results meeting

Stephen Mayne: I am just interested in this Brunswick terminal situation. We're looking to spend $130 million and the state government's come out yesterday and said they're looking at alternative sites, which I assume was a bit of a bolt from the blue.

Can you talk a bit about the reality of that? Is there really alternative sites?

I know this is a key spend to deliver power, and deal with the growth in the city. Can you talk about the process so far - how it's been handled? How we got to this shock position of the government potentially saying this site, where historically we've been, is no longer going to be a viable site?

Ans also one other question on viability. If the lights go out in the city, so say this infrastructure doesn't get built or something happens and the lights go out in the city, where does the liability lye between us and Spark, Citipower?

Chairman: Can I answer the first one Stephen. I guess the issue of redeveloping in a metropolitan large facility, like a Brunswick terminal station, is more problematic given community expectations about those type of facilities.

The process of negotiating with the community, and you're right, the way the industry's divided or set up in Victoria, the involved parties are Citipower, ourselves and AEMO from a transmission planning perspective.

So clearly looking at options that both suit the energy demands and the security demands for the CBD, but also deal with the residents and community expectations is something that we need to try and achieve.

Whether that means or necessitates an alternate site, I don't know - it would be clearly difficult to move and over what time frame that would be something that would have to be looked at, but once again you don't dismiss these suggestions out of hand completely, but it is a work in progress.

I know we are working very closely with the community in terms of options that might suit them but also, suit the security of the CBD and the demand for the CBD.

In terms of liability, I guess it is a problematic question in terms of what would cause a blackout of the CBD - there's many reasons of why that may happen.

So Spark operates part of the infrastructure in the CBD - the Citipower network, Ausnet runs the transmission network but feeds the CBD. Once again it is hard to speculate in terms of where and what fault might occur. We've had outtages in the city previously - due to the inter-connector issues, where fires have gone through those inter-connectors.

So we have planning criteria that allow for redundancy of supply to the city, and a lot of areas of Victoria, and we usually take into account as many as those scenarios as possible.

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