KEY POINTS:
Patrick Strange has a couple of the key credentials to fill one of the top jobs in the power sector.
He knows a fair bit about farming and a lot about being at the centre of a crisis.
The 55-year-old was tending his sheep and beef farm in the backblocks of Gisborne when he got the call to lead Transpower last year.
The operator of the national grid was bruised by clashes with Waikato property owners, feuds with the Electricity Commission and a neverending battle to keep a brittle, ageing transmission system working.
In Strange, Transpower had an engineer who had experience in stepping into a challenge.
Ten years ago he was in the eye of a storm - the catastrophic failure of cables feeding central Auckland.
Thousands of businesses were left without electronic transactions, burglar alarms, petrol pumps, lights and air-conditioning during one of the hottest summers on record.
Scores of diesel-fuelled generators restored some power but the reputation of the city, and the country was left in tatters.
Strange, with a PhD in engineering, had been with the power retailer Mercury for a few months when he found himself in the middle of the disaster. "You remember the impact - what was only a reasonably small area had such a huge impact. I wasn't involved [in that side of the business] and didn't know what a cable was until the lights went out."
Some cables were old but the rest were new and thought to be utterly reliable, Strange says.
Mercury lost all but one, leaving him with the lingering impression that in the power industry there's a big role for plain dumb luck.
"You've almost got to say, 'I don't know how it will happen but we will lose X' - if you knew how it was going to happen you would stop it.
"When you come round to getting risk into your contingency the last person you ask is your engineer - you go and ask someone in marketing because they'll ask 'what if this happens?"'
There was no amount of preparation that could prevent every possibility.
"You've got to have backups, even if it takes you a week you've got to know what you'll do if the unthinkable happens.
"What you've got to do is say, 'We don't know how it will fail but we'd better plan how we're going to recover from a catastrophic failure'."
Mercury was Strange's first pure power sector job. After Auckland University Strange worked in Europe and the United States in a number of jobs as an engineer, risk analyst and in computer start-up businesses.
He had his first experience of the power industry with Fletcher Challenge before starting with Mercury in 1997.
He became chief executive after the death of the incumbent, Wayne Gilbert, in July 1998, and went on to be head of Vector.
"There was a lot of criticism, a lot of it justified after the CBD crisis."
The battle over huge pylons capable of carrying 400KV lines has led to furious groups of protesters burning an effigy of former Transpower head Ralph Craven outside the Tirau town hall. Strange is unwilling to comment on previous regimes, saying only there is room for improvement.
"We can do better. Farmers are running a business and have constraints. Part of our programme is to open up and lift our game working with the farmer.
"When you sit down and talk to them they realise our constraints and we've got to acknowledge theirs."
A five-month inquiry into the pylon plan begins in Hamilton today. Including the Pole 1 replacement Transpower plans to spend more than $3.5 billion on over the next five years.
"You can stretch and stretch it [a grid] but there comes a point - it's a bit like motorways through Auckland. If you leave it too long it becomes impossible."
