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Electricity North West (ENW) avoided cutting power to some customers last night as households responded to calls to limit their energy demand to reduce the stress on reconnected supplies.
The company called on customers to reduce their usual power usage as they approached the evening demand peak as the main substation in Lancaster, which was damaged in storm Desmond at the weekend, is still not back to full capacity.
ENW said the response by customers gave its engineers extra time to add “additional resilience” and means the network is in a “much stronger position now”.
ENW incident manager Steve Cox said: “We’ve had an absolutely fantastic response from customers in Lancaster, Morecambe and the surrounding area who have been saving energy to help us keep power on to everyone.”
The network said customers no longer need to actively reduce demand but is still asking them to be sensible with their usage until the substation is back to full capacity.
The main substation in Lancaster was damaged on Saturday evening by storm Desmond leaving more than 50,000 homes without power. The substation was finally returned online at reduced capacity yesterday morning, returning power to thte last 2,500 homes
Elsewhere more than a 1000 households are still without power in Cumbria due to a number of local substations still being under water.
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