Major customer connection review

With the rapid growth in demand for renewable energy from both the community and industry, Western Power has reviewed its major customer connection process and identified key improvement initiatives to facilitate a more streamlined approach to meet changing business demands.

These opportunities are grouped under five key themes:

1. Reorganise process to eliminate unnecessary work & reduce waiting times
2. Give customers more choice to proceed with higher uncertainty and risk
3. Enable customer self-service to de-constrain studies, design and construction
4. Enable cross-functional collaboration to reduce handovers and re-work
5. Refresh underlying frameworks to enable process change improvements

These are part of our drive to support industry and the WA community to reach net-zero.

We’ve implemented the following changes as part of an improved enquiry process: 

• Optional enquiry phase with collaborative workshop format 
  Streamlined enquiry process timeframe (~3 months) 
  Standardised Enquiry Assessment estimate ($25k) 

We’re on track to deliver new customer self-serve study options: 

• Steady State Studies – ready to go-live in February 2024 
  Dynamic (Wide Area) Studies – target go-live in May 2024 

Industry project quarterly updates

For our major customers with large-scale grid connection opportunities, our quarterly Major Customer Connections Insights Data Report (see below) provides valuable information of project work being undertaken, average timeframes and data relating to project type, industry and region.

Supporting materials

• Major Customer Connections Insights Data Report – December 2023
• MCCP Program - Industry Update (December 2023)