31 December 2025
Year in review: Storm season isn't the only time we're busy
We had a busy start to the year with major flooding in North Queensland and Cyclone Alfred in South-east Queensland, but outside of disaster response the team has been even busier.
Chief Operating Officer Jeff Green said the everyday work of crews and the people who support them is often forgotten, even though almost $2 billion was invested last financial year to maintain, design and build new sections on Queensland’s electricity distribution networks.
“The big events always attract a lot of attention because they lead to a lot of outages and damage, but the reality is the same crews are doing much the same work every day as part of business as usual,” Mr Green said.
“It’s just that the work is spread out over the rest of the year when they’re not responding to floods, fires, storms or cyclones.
“Last financial year we replaced more than 14,500 poles and extended the life of another 13,000 - that’s on top of nearly 19,000 new crossarms, 500km of new powerline, 338 substation and lines projects.
“Crews also put in 1.75 million resource hours to deliver 2334 customer projects – more than the 1.63 million hours for emergency response and just a fraction of the 11 million hours required to deliver regulated and unregulated programs of work across the networks.”
On top of that effort, crews also inspected 402,000 poles and 225,000 electrical assets across 38 programs of work and rectified 74,000 lines defects.
“Safety is our number one priority – for our crews and the communities where they live and work,” Mr Green said.
“That’s why so much focus is on checking our poles and wires and other equipment to make sure that not only are we providing reliable power to customers, but it’s being delivered safely.”
Mr Green said another $2 billion would be invested across the state’s electricity distribution networks in the 2025-26 financial year, with similar targets for inspection, equipment maintenance and upgrades as the previous year.
“The crews, the designers and works planners, our people in the network operations centres and substation teams, and our field delivery teams all play a role in a very complex exercise,” he said.
“And as we’ve seen on the past few weeks, it all has to work around anything the weather throws at them, whether they are in Brisbane, Barcaldine, Port Douglas or Mount Isa.
“We’re always ready for extreme weather events, but we are continually planning for all the things we need to deliver every day.”