Ausgrid
State owned electricity infrastructure company
Ausgrid is an electricity distribution company which owns and operates the electrical networks supplying 1.8 million customers servicing more than 4 million people in Sydney, the Central Coast and Hunter regions of New South Wales, Australia. It was formed in 2011 from the state-owned energy retailer/distributor, EnergyAustralia, when the retail division of the company, along with the EnergyAustralia brand, was sold by the Government of New South Wales, and the remainder renamed Ausgrid.
01History
Ausgrid has received numerous complaints and requests for better stakeholder management and consultation of the local community. Ausgrid was seen as forcing its network capacity increasing (and therefore profit increasing) projects onto local residential communities. Residents in the suburbs of Leichhardt, Penshurst and East Lindfield protested against proposed electricity infrastructure being installed near their homes without proper consultation or response to complaints by the community. The residents, after many urgent appeals to Ausgrid's former COO Trevor Armstrong and the former chairman Roger Massey-Green, instead notified local MPs, the media, the Environmental Protection Authority and other authorities.
Ausgrid was also accused of "gold plating" its assets to inflate the privatisation price. Ausgrid undertook the rapid replacement of its fleet of vehicles.
02Ownership
Ausgrid was wholly owned by the Government of New South Wales from 2011 to 2016. In 2016, the New South Wales Government offered a 99-year lease of a 50.4% stake in Ausgrid. Initial bidding was won by a consortium of State Grid Corporation of China and Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings. On 11 August 2016 the Federal Government blocked the proposal on national security grounds over foreign ownership of critical infrastructure. In September 2016 the New South Wales Government accepted a $16 billion bid from Australian-based consortium AustralianSuper and IFM Investors.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ausgrid”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- (1)George Street-2.jpg by Sardaka (talk) 08:43, 24 June 2013 (UTC), CC BY 3.0
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