Lack of plumbers slows gas roll-out

TASMANIAN natural gas distributor Powerco says it will still make contracted target figures of gas available to 38,500 homes State- wide by April this year. A spokesman for the company said yesterday that Powerco had connected 1835 customers to natural gas so far by December 20 last year - 280 of those were commercial accounts and 1555 residential.The company was answering criticism from Northern Tasmanian meat processor Blue Ribbon, which will shut down the plant within six weeks, citing the major reason yesterday as its inability to get hooked up to natural gas.Blue Ribbon parent company Australian Food Group's managing director Darren Vincent said that it had prepared for the changeover to a gas- fired furnace soon after buying the sprawling Blue Ribbon site at Killafaddy five years ago but was still waiting for available infrastructure.Powerco Tasmanian commercial manager Fraser Kirkpatrick said yesterday that the company was "pretty pleased" with the speed at which it was getting customers connected.Since mid-last year, its customer base has been growing at about 200 new accounts a month.He said that bottlenecks in hooking up new customers to mains pipelines were mostly because of the difficulty in hiring skilled gas fitters for the job.TAFE Tasmania has about 150 plumbers' apprentices enrolled in years one and two, most of whom have decided to go on to complete specialist gas fitting training after their initial apprenticeship."But it takes four years to train people and we could use them now," he said.The company could use an extra two or three teams of two to three tradesmen in Northern Tasmania and eight or nine teams in the South, he said.Industry sources say that there is uncertainty over future development with dates not yet set for meetings between the State Government and Powerco about the next stage of the gas roll-out.READ MORE Gas subsidy not answer - Page 59