Ergon Energy has announced a moratorium on planned outages from Wednesday 23 December-Sunday 3 January.

Executive General Manager Operations Paul Jordon said Ergon was pleased to be able to deliver some good news to customers in the countdown to Christmas.

“We will be doing everything in our power to keep the Christmas lights on – not to mention aircons, fridges and ovens – and we can guarantee there’ll be no planned power interruptions over the festive season.

“We are able to suspend planned outages for maintenance over these key dates because our crews have ramped up work in recent months to boost network reliability and safety.

“Despite the impact of COVID-19 on our program of work, across Queensland Ergon and Energex crews have replaced more than 12,000 power poles and crossarms in 2020,” Paul said.

“They were also able to complete more than 379, 000 customer service orders.”

The only exceptions to the festive moratorium on planned outages will be for work requested by individual customers who are happy for their power supply to be interrupted and forced outages for public safety.

While unplanned outages cannot be prevented - and the risk intensifies during severe weather events - Ergon has teams ready to respond to any faults 24/7.

“We’re all hoping for an outage-free Christmas and New Year, but we cannot control the weather and we have people on-call for emergency response around the clock.

“We don’t want to put a dampener on the festive spirit, but it’s really important for Queenslanders to be prepared for severe storms, cyclones and floods this summer.

“A lot of people are on the road at this time of year, so we’d also urge drivers to take care and stay line aware.

“After all the challenges of 2020, we’re wishing all our customers and communities a safe and happy Christmas and New Year.”