APA have blamed equipment failure for last Friday's catastrophic power failure which affected large parts of North West Queensland.
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APA said its local Diamantina Power Station crews worked with Ergon Energy and customers to restore power as quickly and as safely as possible on Friday.
"At this stage, we believe Friday's outage was triggered by a transmission switchyard equipment failure," an APA spokesperson said.
"All power generation units within the Diamantina Power Station complex were available for operation during this loss of transmission.
"We apologise to our customers and the businesses and communities affected by the outage for the inconvenience caused."
Diamantina is the only power station connecting the region since the start of this year and APA blamed "an operational issue" on Friday for halting power transmission for over five hours in Mount Isa and surrounding districts with businesses and schools forced to close, fuel unavailable and traffic lights not working.
With almost 10,000 customers affected by the outage and industry ground to a halt in Mount Isa, Cloncurry, Dajarra, Julia Creek and Kajabbi, CopperString Managing Director Joseph O'Brien said the North West Minerals Province was too important to not have access to the national grid.
"This is why we need to build CopperString 2.0, we can't have a world leading minerals powerhouse that's without power," Mr O'Brien said.
Bob Katter said the failure proved the North West needed a cheap, reliable, competitive source of power.
"If you have to depend on the Mount Isa Power Station, you've only one source of power and you cannot operate a multi-million-dollar mining operation on the basis of a single power station. Now with CopperString and the power station, you have got a guarantee that this will never occur again because the chances of the transmission line and power station being out at the same time is virtually nil. So we will have secure power," Mr Katter said.
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Derek Barry
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
