Ian McDonald wrote:
Hamilton never went off line. We did however experience a cascaded event of brownouts that resulted from the cause of the Auckland power outage.
No there are definitely parts of Hamilton out - Ruakura, traffic lights etc.
Hey Ian, Funny that, I had conflicting stories suggesting otherwise, such as Innovation Waikato (which is in Ruakura) stayed up. But it was a huge brownout, and I would expect a lot of failures resulting from this. I would also expect that various local feeders on various levels tripping out because of excessive in rush current, eg. motors restarting. I heard that the traffic lights went down in Hamilton and that was pretty much city wide which suggests that the central computer (located in the Municipal building) that controls the traffic lights may well have had a problem caused by the brownout. On top of all that, various places in the sticks on the WEL Networks area suffered outages due to bad weather, and with the varying restore times clearly backs up WELs suggestion that it was a local problem due to bad weather rather than from the TPNZ Otahuhu Substation incident. Anyway, the upshot of all this demonstrates the importance of back-up power (which is an operational matter).