If you're a landowner or occupier of property under our 12,000km of lines, towers and poles then you're an important part of our day-to-day work.
At times we will need to access your property to inspect, maintain, operate, or upgrade our lines, supporting assets and access tracks. Our rights and obligations to do so are either covered by legislation (the Electricity Act 1992) or agreement.
- Covid-19 Response
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Transpower is an essential business, approved as such under the Government’s Essential Business List. It is involved with maintaining, operating, repairing, replacing and reinforcing the national electricity transmission system and grid assets.
Essential work for Transpower is about ensuring our network continues to be available 24/7. That doesn’t just mean fixing faults during the lockdown but doing the work we need to do to stop them occurring in the first place. We have defined essential works as:
- grid asset maintenance activities and project works with grid reliability, compliance, safety and/or condition-based needs,
- completing any works which need to be completed to return Grid to full security,
Importantly, for either 1. or 2. work must also be risk assessed against people, service provider availability, health mitigations, outage system risk and asset risk. This requires our organisation and our service providers to work together to ensure the work can be undertaken safely for all.
- Agreements
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For most landowners, we can accommodate your access requirements within our existing systems. However, if you have specific and more complex access arrangements, we may wish to seek a formal agreement with you. We’ll touch base with you if we believe it might be mutually beneficial to have such an agreement.
This may be an Easement Agreement (a property interest registered on the certificate of title for the property) or a Land Access management agreement. If you would like to discuss a land access agreement speak to your Service Provider contact or email us. Alternatively, we will touch base with you if we believe it might be mutually beneficial to have such an agreement.
Easement Agreement
An easement agreement is always required when we build new lines and may be necessary when we upgrade existing lines. It covers our access obligations and rights as well as legally describing the property interest that we purchase from you.
We will seek an easement on your land when we are planning a new line route over your land or if we are undertaking upgrade work on your property that goes beyond the level of changes that we can make under the Electricity Act. An easement is a property interest registered on the certificate of title for the property.
New Lines
Whenever we build a new line, we will negotiate an easement with you as a landowner for towers or lines planned on or over your property. The compensation or purchase price of the easement will be based on the market value of the land required and will be undertaken by a registered valuer.
Existing Lines
For existing lines, if we undertake any upgrade work that results in any 'injurious affect' to your land, we will negotiate an easement from you just as we do for new lines. Compensation for this sort of easement would be based on the difference between the value of property assessed before and after registration of the easement.
Injurious affection is the permanent loss of value to land.
No surprises
Burning crop off-cuts or stubble is occasionally carried out on rural properties. If you are planning on doing this within 100m of Transpower’s lines and have the necessary permits, please let us know by calling your Landowner Liaison Officer.
Generally, smoke and high voltage transmission lines are not a good match, so it’s helpful if we’re made aware of a burn-off.
Please note: in Canterbury (where this is a requirement in ECan’s Regional Plan) this notification to Transpower suffices in terms of obtaining our approval.
How did we do?
If we have recently visited your property, we would like to hear from you about our services. Please fill in our Landowner post-work feedback form.
- Statutory rights
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Our rights to enter land, and work and maintain most of our lines originate from the Electricity Act 1992.
There are other statutes which impact on our relationship too.
- Contacting Us
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The conduct of our staff and service providers on your property is very important to us. We are interested in receiving any feedback that you have about our service, both positive and negative. Use the contact form on the contact us page, or call us on 0508 LANDOWNER.