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 in a
tweet on Sunday afternoon.
In a later , 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
