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Electricity Industry Act 2010

Miscellaneous - State-owned enterprise asset reconfiguration and miscellaneous matters - Distributors' and grid owners' exemption from liability

131: Distributors and grid owners exempt from liability for certain outages

You could also call this:

“Power companies can't be blamed for some blackouts”

You can’t ask a distributor or the owner of the national grid for money if they cause damage because of a power outage. This is true if the outage happened because they were following the rules or doing what they were told to do by the people in charge. The rules they have to follow are called regulations and the Code. The people who can tell them what to do are called the Authority and the system operator. If the distributor or grid owner was just doing what they were supposed to do, you can’t blame them for any damage from a power outage.

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130: Specific authorisations for purposes of Commerce Act 1986, or

"Allowed actions in the electricity industry that don't break competition rules"

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131A: Application of electricity industry legislation to secondary networks, or

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Part 5 Miscellaneous
State-owned enterprise asset reconfiguration and miscellaneous matters: Distributors' and grid owners' exemption from liability

131Distributors and grid owners exempt from liability for certain outages

  1. No claim for damages may be made against a distributor or the owner of the national grid in relation to damage caused by, or arising from, an outage that resulted from the distributor or grid owner complying with—

  2. the regulations or the Code; or
    1. any instruction issued by the Authority or the system operator under the regulations or the Code that the distributor or grid owner was obliged to comply with.