We held a community meeting at the Tīnui Hall in late 2023, to answer questions and hear suggestions on community resilience from people in the Tīnui and East Coast area, stretching from Mataikona to Stronvar and including Tīnui, Castlepoint and Riversdale Beach communities.
About 40 people attended, with many travelling more than an hour-and-a-half to speak to us on a wide range of topics, from magpies to forestry and reclosers to emergency power solutions.
Thank you for the time you put in to preparing and attending this meeting.
Since then, we’ve been working to improve the reliability and quality of power supply for our customers in this Wairarapa district. You’ll see some of our progress and planned work below.
Castlepoint and Riversdale Beach emergency backup generators
Earlier this year (2024), we installed backup generators in both the Castlepoint and Riversdale Beach communities. Electricity to these communities is supplied by single feeders, which means we’re unable to re-route power from another feeder to restore supply if there’s an outage.
With generation, there’s a resource ready to help power the communities in the event of the electricity feed being unavailable for an extended period of time. It also enables Castlepoint and Riversdale communities to set up community hubs to supply essential services for people in the event of a natural disaster.
It's important to know, these generators are not currently digitally connected to our Network Operations Centre (NOC) in New Plymouth. This means they cannot be turned on remotely by our network controllers. While we're working towards enabling the generators to be controlled remotely, at present, a technician is required to travel to the generator sites to turn them on manually. For this reason, they are currently only able to be used for extended outages. For example, in their current state, the generators will be an asset in storm events when extensive damage to the network could leave the community without power for extended periods while repairs to power poles and lines are made.
The Castlepoint generator has been installed at the township’s wastewater treatment site, while the Riversdale Beach generator is on private farmland about 3km out of the township on Homewood Rd.
Spur fuses
Spurs come off a main electricity line and supply a group of customers. We have installed spur fuses on nine spurs which come off the Mataikona segment of the electricity feeders. This means if there’s a fault on these spur lines, affecting a few customers, it won’t trip the entire main line, which would result in potentially hundreds of properties being without power.
Blairlogie backfeed
There is now a second option for power suppy to Langdale, Tīnui, Riversdale Beach, Mangapakeha, Castlepoint and Mataikona.These communities are now able to have their power suppled by another power line (the Blairlogie feeder) if an outage affects their power line.
