The company which services most of Dunedin and Otago released its annual report for the 2021-22 financial year yesterday.
In it, the company said its financial statements reflected good growth in new consumer connections, increased levels of capital investment and improved financial performance.
However, the DCC-owned company has, along with its shareholder, decided to forego a dividend payment for the year as it continued to prioritise the significant network investment, it said.
The company’s total capital investment was $83 million last year, compared to the $76.6 million the year before and $53.6 million in 2019-20, the report said.
A joint update from chairman Steve Thompson and chief executive Dr Richard Fletcher said it had been an "excellent year of progress".
The company’s profit ($7.8 million) was $6.6 million above its $1.2 million forecasted profit due to higher than anticipated revenue from consumer connections, as the region grew, and below budget non-network operating expenditure.
The company made significant progress on its programme to maintain and upgrade assets across the network and there was another year of stabilised network performance, the report said.
Reliability was improving across most parts of the network but there were some localised areas where the level of unplanned supply interruptions remained too high and so the company was "targeting investment and operational focus in these areas".
"We can see our hard work starting to pay off," Mr Thompson and Dr Fletcher said.
"A substantial proportion of end-of-life assets have either been replaced or upgraded, our wider work programme is progressing to plan, and we’re seeing ongoing improvements to processes, systems, and data capture.
"All of this is supporting better decision making.
"In 2018, we signalled the start of a multi-year programme of major network and business investment.
"We are on track and are confident that network performance will continue to improve as we stay focused on our published priorities."
Aurora owns and operates the poles, lines and other equipment that distributes electricity from Transpower's national grid to over 92,000 homes, farms and businesses in Dunedin, Central Otago and Queenstown Lakes.
The company was ordered to pay a penalty of nearly $5 million by the High Court for excessive power cuts between 2016 and 2019, which stemmed from inadequate maintenance.
It is presently part-way through a five-year, $563 million investment programme.
