Powerlink has a strong focus on seeking feedback and insights from customers and stakeholders to ensure our business is delivering valued outcomes.
Queensland Household Energy Survey
Since 2009, Powerlink in conjunction with Ergon Energy and Energex (part of the Energy Queensland group), has run the Queensland Household Energy Survey. Thousands of households across Queensland are surveyed on their energy usage, appliance saturation and energy efficient behaviours.
Previous years survey reports can be viewed under the Resources section on this page. In 2023, along with the report, an interactive website was created where you can explore the survey results by theme, viewing the data by location, age group, solar PV ownership and other household characteristics, track trends and more.
Understanding how our customers are changing behaviours and adopting new technology is critical to providing safe, cost effective and reliable electricity networks into the future.
The 2024 survey has now closed. Thank you to everyone who completed it and we will share the results later this year.
Stakeholder Perception Survey
Each year we conduct a survey with our stakeholders to get a better understanding of how they perceive Powerlink’s performance and their key issues. This survey guides our engagement planning and provides important insights into what matters most to our customers and stakeholders.
Since 2012, the biennial Powerlink Stakeholder Perception Survey (SPS) has been an important tool to help Powerlink Queensland continue to improve its stakeholder engagement capabilities, systems and performance.
Each alternate year, the survey is conducted as a shorter, online ‘pulse’ survey, through a voluntary, self-completed survey via a link sent to stakeholders – as opposed to the full interview style survey with stakeholders undertaken in the other years.
In 2022 the full interview style survey was conducted and involved 108 respondents. Respondents were predominately Landholders and Customers (19% each), who have historically held more negative views of Powerlink. The high response rate by landholders does demonstrate that their activity levels and interest in Powerlink operations has increased. For comparison, in the 2019 online survey the two largest respondent groups were Customers and Utilities.
In terms of reputation, while the trend has increased over the past ten years, the increase has been marginal and remained relatively stable over the past three years. In 2022, Powerlink’s overall score for reputation was 3.76 out of 5, a slight improvement on both the 2021 and 2020. In addition, 47% of stakeholders perceived Powerlink’s reputation to be getting better, compared with 37 per cent in 2020.
In 2022, stakeholders accorded Powerlink a Social Licence to Operate (SLO) score of 3.98 out of 5.00, placing it into the high approval range. This was a slight decrease from 2020 of 4.03 overall.
Community Sentiment Survey
Powerlink engaged external research firm Voconiq to conduct community sentiment research across communities in the Southern, Central Queensland (CQ) and Far North Queensland (FNQ) regions. The Southern Queensland research was conducted in mid-2021, followed by the CQ and FNQ research in mid-2022. A total of 1,798 survey responses were retained for analysis, representing the most current and substantial dataset available in Queensland on local sentiment towards renewable energy and Powerlink’s role in shaping Queensland’s new energy future. About 27% of the total sample were existing landholders who co-exist with Powerlink in various regions.
Powerlink is building a greater local presence across local communities to better meet their expectations around project development and help them to understand how they can best influence how this development occurs in their area. The research outlines that increasing community awareness of Powerlink, its role in renewable energy development and increasing its participation in community life through investment and collaborative activities should be key areas for improvement.
