At this point it seems a bit pointless coming to work this morning. I’m sitting in a dark office with the cheeping of UPS’s (uninterruptible power supplies) and ozone as the batteries discharge keeping servers alive.
The entire crew are sitting around waiting for the power to come back on, like large number of people in Auckland this morning.
Power went out over West Auckland, North Shore, and Rodney this morning at about 8am. Servers are crashing as their UPS batteries are running out of power. I can’t get coffee, the cafe has gas but no plungers. Even then I couldn’t pay – no EFTPOS.
A large chunk of business capital of Auckland is not working.
Transpower says about 280,000 customers from West Auckland, North Shore and Northland are affected.
Transpower spokesman Geoff Wishart said the main Otahuhu-Henderson line was tripped while maintenance was being carried out on the back-up line.
By the sound of it, the chronic lack of capital investment by the power companies is impacting on the Auckland region again. This is a repeat of the 1998 power problems in Auckland Central with inadequate capacity being put in early enough to carry the loads.
Perhaps it is time to look at de-privatising the power grid and start doing some serious investment. Rather than going for dividends to shareholders, especially the government, we’d get better dividends from keeping businesses running.
Update: Our power just came back on. Now to clear the debris.
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