Thank you for your understanding and patience as we all work together to ensure as many people as possible continue to have power.

Currently all residential and most businesses have had power restored.  Due to the issue with Transpower’s tower, we are running on reduced power.  We got through last night’s peak power use time (5pm – 9 pm) with everyone conserving as much energy as possible, and by turning off the hot water.  Thank you to everyone for your efforts.

Transpower are working hard to install a temporary tower so that the high voltage circuit from the fallen tower can be restored.  At this stage we understand this work will take through the weekend to complete.

This morning we need everyone to continue to conserve electricity so we can keep the power going to as many of you as possible.  You should have hot water in your cylinder that would have heated overnight, but hot water control will be used again this morning.  Once you use the hot water in your cylinder, this will not be reheated until later in the day or after 10pm tonight.

As you start your day please try to use as little power as possible, things like having cereal instead of a hot breakfast, not using your washing machine, dryer or dishwasher and only heating the room you are will all help!

We’d like to give a huge shout out to our large industrial customers who have had to shut down their operations, meaning that their normal power use could be distributed around the network to get power on to households, schools and other businesses.  Without their help we would need to be rationing power to everyone.
Over the coming days we will need to be working together to conserve energy and hot water controls will be in place to help keep the power within what we have available, particularly in the morning and evening peak use times – this is 5am until 9am and 4pm until 10 pm.  We’ll keep in touch as things progress but people should be prepared for the possibility of more outages, particuarly if power demand exceeds what we have available.