Kalgoorlie blackout: Thousands of customers lose power in Goldfields city in latest electricity outage

A mishap during Western Power maintenance work left thousands of Kalgoorlie residents without electricity on Wednesday morning. The Australian Energy Market Operator was forced to declare a “system black” across the eastern Goldfields network, according to energy market logs obtained by The West Australian. It launched an emergency restart procedure just after 10am. Those logs also show that Western Power had planned to “island” — temporarily disconnect — the region’s grid before sunrise to undertake “planned maintenance”. But a back-up generator supporting the city tripped, State Government-owned Western Power later admitted. The blackout left at least 10,000 homes without power for about two hours during the morning. “Western Power crews and network operations teams have worked to restore power to around 10,000 homes and businesses in the Kalgoorlie and Boulder area.,” it said in a statement. The back-up generation tripped just after the maintenance had been finished and Western Power said crews “worked as quickly and safely as possible to restore power”. Opposition leader Shane Love said residents had “every right to be furious”. “It’s simply not good enough. Families and businesses in the Goldfields have had a bloody gutful of being let down by a Government that can’t deliver the basics, like keeping the lights on,” Mr Love said. Treasurer Rita Saffioti said improving network resilience in the region was a “priority” and noted plans for a new battery near the town. “We have a big network and particularly in the outer parts, the resilience is something that’s very much a focus.” Electricity progressively came back online for some parts of the city and some customers had reported outages of between 30 minutes to an hour. An AEMO spokesman said it was “aware of the situation in the eastern Goldfields”. “AEMO continues to monitor the situation and work closely with Western Power as re-energisation continues,” he said. It comes after a severe outage in the summer heat of January 2024 that took days to fully fix. A storm knocked out five major transmission towers in that 2024 blackout event and the crucial transmission linked was rebuilt and re-energised over nine days.