SUSTAINABILITY
REGULATIONS ON
IN AUSTRALIA In 2015 electricity network service providers in Australia will be required to meet new economic benchmarking requirements set by the Australian Energy Regulator. The economic benchmarking will require that network service providers report additional information on the vegetation management activities that occur on their networks.
B
y undertaking economic benchmarking, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) hopes to determine a network service providers (NSPs) efficient level of expenditure on activities including vegetation management, which can vary depending on the operating environment of each network.
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WHAT CHANGES ARE COMING? To get a better understanding of the extent of vegetation management activities across the networks for benchmarking purposes, the AER has changed the number of management variables to be reported on to now include: • The number of vegetation maintenance spans and the total number of spans • Average vegetation maintenance span cycle • Average number of trees per vegetation management span • Average number of defects per vegetation management span • Tropical proportion • Bushfire risk.
What this means is that an NSP must now find ways to report on actual metrics, such as the number of trees per vegetation management span as described above, or provide estimates using various methods acceptable to the AER. Providing the AER with this data is critical for the NSPs because the data will be used to set revenues for the next regulatory period, which concludes in 2015 in Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland and South Australia. Given that the industry has traditionally outsourced vegetation management to external contractors, the data the AER is seeking will usually only be found in contractor IT systems, if it exists at all. Getting access to contractor data and validating its correctness, as well as augmenting existing data to meet the new AER requirements, is expected to prove very challenging and expensive for most Australian NSPs. To take the average number of trees per vegetation management span as an example, the AER requires NSPs to only include trees that require active vegetation management, i.e. trees that only require