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Power use highest ever

Published on August 22^nd 2011, 9:11am

History was made when the heaviest snowfall in memory covered parts of Northland on Tuesday.

The polar blast freezing the country brought light morning snow to Maunu mountain, 9km west of Whangarei, and heavier falls on the Tangihua, Tutamoe and other central Northland ranges.

Northpower network service manager Graham Dawson said peak loadings that day went off the chart in the supply company’s control room, exceeding past peaks of 150 megawatts by about 15 per cent.

“Around lunchtime we had a peak loading of 172 megawatts, or for the petrol heads that’s about 230,000 horsepower. So it was really foot hard to the floor,” he said. Such cold weather was unexpected in the region and the record surge in power use surprised Northpower staff.

“We were all a bit wide-eyed when it happened,” Mr Dawson said. “Everything is designed to handle that type of load but the equipment had never been stressed that hard.”

Northpower staff were delighted their firm’s investment, planning and maintenance had paid off, with the network coping with the big increase in power consumption without any problems.

“We had carried out extensive load control throughout the morning with water heating load shedding, but we had to bring this load back on late morning to ensure that homes and industry had enough hot water for later in the day when we would have to start controlling this load again for the evening peak,” Mr Dawson said .

“We were very pleased with the way the Northpower network stood up to this really quite impressive load. There were no incidents. All our main sub-transmission lines, switchgear and transformers performed very well.”

Mr Dawson said there were dips in voltage during the day but they were caused by disturbances on the national grid.

Top Energy network manager Keith Gilby said a record peak of 82 megawatts was recorded in Far North power consumption at 6.30pm on Tuesday, and 80 megawatts was recorded on Monday.

The usual winter peak was 76 megawatts, he said.

A director of Barrell’s 100% Mega Store in Whangarei, Peter Hill, said there had been a spike in sales of heaters and electric blankets at the beginning of winter but customers had not been rushing to buy these items over the past three days.

MetService weather forecaster Bob McDavitt said there had been a -0.1C frost at Kaikohe yesterday morning and a temperature of 2C was forecast for Whangarei last night. But the possibility of more snow in Northland was fading as the polar blast that had gripped the country for several days moved to the east.

The temperature in Whangarei about 1pm yesterday was 11C,  while 13C was forecast for the city today and 14C tomorrow.

“An anticyclone is expected to move over the South Island tomorrow and cover much of the country by Sunday night,” Mr McDavitt said. “Early next week, Whangarei will be back into 15s or more.”

Mike Barrington The Northern Advocate

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