A takeaway business near Wānaka was forced to borrow a generator this morning after a power cut left it and hundreds of other customers without electricity.
The outage affected 1,156 properties around Albert Town and Lake Hāwea, beginning at around 5:40 a.m. Aurora Energy is investigating the cause of the power cut, but by noon, the number of properties without power had dropped to fewer than 40.
One of the businesses impacted was Wingin’ It takeaways, owned by Ravi Singh in Lake Hāwea. Singh described the morning as particularly challenging.
“The power’s been out for a while now, and we were really worried about our stock,” he said. “We have two fridges and two freezers, and none of them were working. We had to go out and get a generator just to get things back on. But it’s been a struggle.”
Although the generator allowed them to restart operations, Singh explained that they were unable to fully operate and were hoping for the power to be restored as soon as possible.
Aurora Energy explained that the restoration process was delayed due to fire restrictions currently in place. The utility uses automatic reclosers to restore power quickly after a short outage, but these could create sparks if there had been any damage to the network during the fault.
To reduce the risk of fire, Aurora disables the automatic reclosers during a prohibited fire season. This meant that fault crews had to manually inspect the lines to ensure everything was safe before the power could be turned back on.
Aurora Energy acknowledged that the process took longer but emphasized the trade-off between quicker restoration and the need to minimize fire risk.
