Substation fault blamed for Tauranga power outage

Power was restored around 1.20am. Photo: Stuff.

A fault at a substation on the national power grid plunged thousands of Tauranga properties into darkness.

Powerco confirmed to SunLive this morning that 42,184 properties across Tauranga and the wider Western Bay were affected.

"Last night's outage was on the national grid," says a Powerco spokesperson.

"All customers were reconnected by 1.20am Friday."

The National grid operator, Transpower, says the outage was a result of a fault at a substation, and it took some time to get all customers back online.

Thirty-five thousand properties were affected by the outage.

Transpower's principal adviser for stakeholders Geoff Wishart says crews worked overnight to get people connected again.

"Very many apologies to those people, consumers, who were without power."

An outage an hour earlier cut power to another 10,000 plus properties.

Power was also out to 74 properties in Whanganui, and was due to be restored by around the same time although some reported their power was restored earlier.

Powerco says trees on lines caused one outage, while the cause of another was a substation fault.

-Additional reporting from RNZ.

1 comment

People work hard...

Posted on 14-10-2022 15:26 | By morepork

... to restore service when these outages occur and I, for one, am grateful. But they shouldn't have to. Trees hitting a major power line, or a major substation failure, are prime examples of the type of event that a properly designed and maintained reticulation should be able to handle automatically, using network redundancy. ALL major nodes on a network should have alternate routing so that service is maintained while repairs are effected to the damaged node. But it would require investment, rather than just creaming profits. Our Electricity supplies are not even up to 3rd world standards, and yet we have some of the most expensive (and unreliable) power on the planet. It doesn't have to be like that; all it needs is consumer resistance and push back. But, apparently, you'd rather scrabble round in the dark, looking for a torch...


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