Shocking state of power poles ‘could put lives at risk’

going to get killed,” said Peters. “We’re particularly concerned about children.

“We did a study on this and found that from 2025 on a lot of private land the condition is going to get substantially worse. They’ll be hitting 40 to 50 years old and that’s when they need to be replaced. We’re going to see a lot more line failings and that raises the risk of people getting hurt, by being electrocuted or by poles falling on them.”

After a natural disaster, distributors have told the Herald they feel a social responsibility to help property owners restore power but the way the law stands they can’t recover their costs. In 2012 a report to ENA by consultants Energia on the management of service lines estimated the problem of pole failure rates to be 10 times greater than what was considered reasonable.

“The size of the problem is large with the cost to replace ‘at risk’ service lines over the next 12 years estimated at $370 million, with maintenance estimated to be a further $230m,” Energia said six years ago. A bid by the ENA two years ago to find a solution with the Commerce Commission was rejected.

The ENA proposed that the cost of maintaining customer service lines be treated as a regulated cost under the Commerce Act so distributors could maintain customer service lines and recover their costs.

The ENZ raised the issue again with the commission early last year, challenging its opinion.

The commission in a statement to the Herald said: “The commission Graeme Peters does not set Government policy. While in our view the legislation is clear, we appreciate that in practice, determining the exact point of supply can be difficult.”

But the commission expected electricity lines companies to ensure connections to their networks were safe. They were responsible for communicating with landowners to ensure they understood their obligations to maintain their lines.

Peters said ENA had recently held discussions with relevant authorities, including WorkSafe, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and the commission.

Vector had spent “tens of millions” maintaining private land poles and lines when it saw a safety risk, said chief network officer Andre Botha. Servicing them alone had cost Vector $38m in the past four financial years.

An MBIE spokesman said the ministry “is aware of the issue, is investigating it and will be providing advice to the Minister [of Commerce] once it has a better understanding of the scale of the problem and potential solutions”.

“It’s basically a problem with the law,” said Peters. “We’d like more flexibility to interpret the law. We’d like the ability to fix these lines but at the moment we can’t recover the cost. That means other consumers have to pay a cross-subsidy.

“We’re at a landing point now where the distribution companies have the responsibility to this thing called ‘point of supply’ which is mainly on the boundary of a property. For example a house with a power pole on the property that would be point of supply. It gets more complex, especially in Auckland where you’ve got three houses down a right-of-way. Where is the point of supply? Is it the power pole or where it enters private land? The line might travel the privately-owned shared right-of-way. That’s confusing and open to interpretation.”

Peters said if a tree comes down on a consumer service line a network might fix it but would charge for the service, and that leads to issues.