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Ngawha gets credit for power staying on

Published on January 27^th 2010, 1:47pm

Power was lost to more than 50,000 Auckland and Northland homes when pylons sparked a fire in trees on a Waikato property on Monday.

The fire caused a fault on two of the transmission lines that feed the region. With the Otahuhu power station out of action for maintenance, Transpower declared a grid emergency and called on electricity retailers to reduce pressure on the network by implementing rolling outages.

Northpower communications manager Vanessa Wilson said Northpower was initially directed to reduce load by 10 per cent at 3.30pm, then by another 10 per cent at 4.24pm.

Ms Wilson said altogether 23,009 Northpower customers had power cuts for up to three hours. Others had their hot water load reduced.

“We commenced rolling cuts at 6.50pm believing at that time the event was going to extend into the night. However, the supply was fully restored at 7.13pm, excluding hot water load,” she said.

Ms Wilson said Golden Bay Cement and the New Zealand Refining Company voluntarily reduced load to help the situation, sparing more cuts.

Meanwhile, Top Energy’s customers narrowly escaped joining those households which were without power, but were not entirely immune, as Top Energy was forced to control power to hot water cylinders, chief executive Russell Shaw said.

“We responded by turning off ripple-controlled hot water cylinders on our network and were on standby to cut supply, if required. Fortunately, we were also able to maximise generation output at our Ngawha Power Station, which meant less load for the national grid. Although we did not have to cut supply in the end, it was a close-run thing,” Mr Shaw said.

He said the fact the outage was caused by the sagging lines igniting trees demonstrated why his company’s own vegetation control programme was critical.

“The company is investing $9million in an aggressive vegetation control programme for its Far North network, over the next three years.”

Mr Shaw said Top Energy’s investments in generation at Ngawha and current and future network reliability and capacity investments would prove hugely beneficial for Far North power consumers.

“With the new generation station at Ngawha we can ride through faults and outages like the one we had [on Monday] night,” he said.

It was confirmed yesterday that there will be no compensation for those affected.

Read the full article on the Northern Advocate’s website.

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