However, on Thursday the Electricity Authority said Transpower had since provided new evidence, and an international expert had found Transpower had met the required standards.
As a result, the Electricity Authority had dropped its complaint – but it was now considering whether the standards needed to be changed, or whether a different approach was needed to “reflect New Zealand’s specific circumstances”.
In particular, the current code did not apply to outside contractors, such as the French-owned company Omexom, which was working on the pylon at the time.
The authority said it was “considering whether the concept of good electricity industry practice is fit for purpose, including in circumstances where industry participants may contract out significant parts of their functions”.
Meanwhile, Transpower welcomed the authority’s decision to drop the complaint.
Executive general manager grid delivery Mark Ryall said it confirmed the company’s position that its processes and systems were “consistent with good industry practice”.
“An independent report found the tower fall was caused by a crew working for our service provider failing to follow approved processes and procedures. It also highlighted that, despite strong systems and oversight, human error can still occur.”
Ryall said the tower fall should never have happened, and apologised for the impact on people and businesses in Northland.
Since then Transpower had strengthened its oversight of service providers, to make sure their practices were robust and their crews had the correct skills and training.
“We continue to work hard with our service providers to improve our practices to ensure that we can prevent an incident like this happening again,” Ryall said.
A report ordered by then Energy Minister Simeon Brown shortly after the accident made 26 recommendations for Transpower, Omexom, the Electricity Authority and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
All 19 recommendations for Transpower have since been carried out.
In November last year, Sydney-based law firm Piper Alderman started class action against Transpower and Omexom on behalf of the roughly 20,000 businesses affected by the outage.
The firm did not specify how much money it was seeking, but economic consultants Infometrics estimated businesses had lost $60m as a result of the power cut, while the Northland Chamber of Commerce put the figure at $80m.
In the months after the collapse, Northland’s Chamber of Commerce and local MP Grant McCallum pushed hard for compensation from Transpower and Omexom.
Eventually, the companies agreed to give $500,000 each to a “resilience fund” supporting projects with long-term benefits for Northland.
About 180,000 people were affected by the outage.
– RNZ
