Some 30,000 Con Ed customers in New York City were left without power temporarily yesterday as the utility fought a string of outages caused by the heatwave that struck the city this weekend.
“Here’s where we stand: Con Ed is taking 30K customers in Brooklyn, including Carnarsie, Mill Basin and Flatbush, temporarily off power so it can make repairs and prevent a bigger outage,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a tweet on Sunday afternoon.
In a later tweet, De Blasio said Con Ed would begin bringing back customers to the grid at a rate of 500 at a time beginning midnight.
The heatwave hit New York on Friday and although on that day Con Ed said it was confident in the capacity of its equipment to withstand a spike in consumption, events proved otherwise.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo condemned the blackout and threatened to revoke Con Ed’s license.
“There is no God-given right that says Con Ed must be the utility company,” Cuomo said as quoted by CBS New York. “They can be replaced.”
At the moment, according to the string of De Blasio’s tweets, Con Ed was working hard to restore the electricity supply in all affected areas and also prepare its system for another heatwave later this week.
The utility also conducted a speedy investigation to identify the cause of the massive outage and issued a statement that said, “Our investigation has involved inspecting and testing transmission equipment, and analyzing the large volumes of data. Through this work, we determined that the outage was not caused by transmission equipment. Further analysis identified the issues with the relay protection system.”
“This system was supposed to be designed with redundancies. We paid Con Ed to design that system. They are not a charity,” Governor Cuomo said. The State Office of Emergency Management sent 200 troopers, 1200 generators, and 50 light towers to help restore power as soon as possible. The Governor also initiated a state investigation into the outages.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
