Network assets

People and places

We have a team of more than 2,000 talented people, including highly skilled tradespeople and professionals on the ground and on call to support communities across central and western Victoria.

These services are delivered from 14 depots as well as a purpose-built customer contact centre in Bendigo and our corporate office in Melbourne. From here we manage hundreds of thousands of poles, almost 100,000 kilometres of powerlines and deliver services for almost 1.2 million households and business customers. Our assets include the meters that measure the amount of electricity you use.

Having people and equipment located across our networks means we can respond quickly to customer needs and make sure the network is safe and reliable for the communities we service.

Network control centres

Our networks are managed by electricity control rooms that operate 24/7, 365 days a year. The control centres manage the flow of electricity to and from your place while monitoring the performance and security of our network.

Our high-tech control centre receives outage signals from across our network and guides crews on the ground to act or restore power as quickly and safely as possible.

Each year, thousands of jobs are managed by our network controllers – mobilising crews where needed to fix faults on the network, or to conduct routine repair and maintenance jobs.

Network controllers mobilise crews for the following types of jobs

• completing network upgrades to provide increased power to communities with improved reliability
• customer requested projects like new connections to homes or buildings
• decommissioning lines and powering new ones including underground cables
• hundreds of requests to move powerlines to support roadworks or to allow wide and high loads like wind farm turbines to be transported to their development sites
• preparing our networks for high peak demand and bushfire risks over summer.

Smart meters

Smart meters are safe and accurate, and they help us plan to meet power demands. It means you can count on your electricity bills being entirely accurate, rather than an estimate or average. They’ve made a real difference to improving the safety, reliability and efficiency of our network.

The data we gather from smart meters helps us keep your supply of power consistent, as well as monitor the performance of our network.

Between 2009 and 2013 we installed more than 1,000,000 smart meters in homes and businesses across the CitiPower and Powercor networks. Around 97% of our customers have smart meters and we continue to install them for all new connections.

While we were able to upgrade most customers under the initial rollout, there are still around 25,000 properties that did not receive a smart meter due. We offer free exchanges for any old meter to upgrade to a smart meter. If you would like to arrange for a free upgrade to a smart meter, please contact our team on  13 22 06  between 7am and 7pm Monday to Friday.