1. Pursuant to section 172I of the Electricity Act 1992 (“Act”), I notify the amendment of the Electricity Governance Rules 2003 (“Rules”) under section 172H of the Act.
2. The empowering provision for the electricity governance regulations in relation to which the amendment to the Rules is made is section 172D(1)(14) of the Act.
3. A brief description of the nature of the amendment is as follows:
The insertion of a new Rule 6.5A of Technical Code B of Schedule C3 of Part C which will relieve North Island distributors and direct connect customers, and South Island grid owners, from the obligation to
have automatic under-frequency load shedding systems (“AUFLS”) in place in circumstances to be notified by the System Operator.
4. The amendment is made under urgency, in reliance on section 172E(3) of the Act.
5. Pursuant to section 172Z(4) of the Act, the reasons for my decision to amend the Rules are that:
(a) potential overlaps between the obligations under the Electricity Governance (Security of Supply) Regulations 2008 (“Regulations”) and the obligation to provide AUFLS mean that those feeders that would probably best meet the criteria for being scheduled for disconnection first in the event of rolling outages under the Regulations, are also likely to be those tagged as AUFLS blocks;
(b) to simultaneously meet the existing AUFLS obligations and the requirements of the Regulations, distributors would need to apply rolling outages to non-AUFLS feeders;
(c) this could result in higher priority load being interrupted under the rolling outage arrangements under the Regulations than would otherwise be required;
(d) making this amendment under urgency is appropriate to allow consultation to take place on these Rules concurrently with the consultation with the Regulations; and
(e) the required consultation processes for each of the Regulations and this amendment can now be undertaken concurrently, enabling consideration of the package of arrangements collectively.
6. These rules come into force on 9 October 2008.
7. Copies of the Rules may be inspected free of charge or purchased from the Electricity Commission, Level 7, ASB Bank Tower, 2 Hunter Street, Wellington.
8. The Rules can also be viewed on the Electricity Commission’s website
http://www.electricitycommission.govt.nz/rulesandregs/rules
Dated at Wellington this 8th day of September 2008.
DAVID PARKER, Minister of Energy.