Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro assures there’s plenty of power generation on the system and that Monday morning’s widespread but brief outage had nothing to do with overall reliability as we head into the frigid winter months.
Thousands of customers were plunged into darkness for about 15 minutes Monday as the Maritime Link experienced a disruption on the system.
The corporation which generates about 90 percent of our electricity had to quickly shed customers in order to bring the system back online. The generators do not respond in a split second to a sudden surge in demand so Hydro had to drop customers for a few minutes.
Rob Collett, vice president of engineering, likens it to some people moving a couch, dropping it, and picking it back up again.
He says when dealing with new assets these things can happen from time to time. He says while he can’t assure that this won’t happen in the future, he can say they will always have it restored in a timely manner, hopefully in a 15 to 20-minute range.