Networks race to restore power following weekend storms

Around 220,000 homes suffered power cuts over the weekend as the north of the UK was battered by two storms in quick succession.

Roughly one in five households disconnected by storms Malik and Corrie were still without power on Monday morning (31 January).

The worst affected network was Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), which saw 68,000 of its customers disconnected by Storm Malik on Saturday. The company said it expected the vast majority of the 7,000 customers still without power at 10am on Monday to be reconnected later in the day, with the final restorations taking place on Tuesday.

The distribution network operator (DNO) said its initial assessments indicated that a further 38,000 customers had been disconnected by Storm Corrie on Sunday night. The company said 33,000 were still without power on Monday morning, with 19,000 being affected by two major faults in the Stonehaven area and Deeside that were expected to be resolved within the day.

It said restoration efforts were expected to continue into Tuesday but it was still assessing the damage from Storm Corrie, which saw winds speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour, and that some small clusters of homes may be without power until Wednesday.

Richard Gough, director of distribution system operations at SSEN, said: “Our teams have continued to make strong progress restoring power to customers impacted by the extreme weather from Storm Malik, with over 90% of those customers restored.

“Whilst our teams are making every effort to restore customers as soon as possible, the cumulative impact of Storms Malik and Corrie has compounded the restoration challenge. As a result, we are advising customers that while expected restoration of customer supplies from Storm Malik remains Tuesday evening, restoration times for some of those impacted by Storm Corrie may now extend to Wednesday.

“We would like to apologise to all customers affected and would like to reassure them that all available resources have been deployed to support with restoration efforts and our teams are doing all they can to restore power as quickly as possible, where it is safe to do so.

“We continue to proactively contact customers on our Priority Services Register to offer extra support where required and work with local resilience partners to coordinate welfare provisions.”

Northern Powergrid was also badly affected by the storms, with around 80,000 of its customers being disconnected. As of 8am on Monday, the DNO said 4,000 customers were still without power following Storm Malik and a further 3,000 were known to have been disconnected during Storm Corrie. The company said it was confident only a small proportion would have to wait until Tuesday to be reconnected.

Like SSEN, Northern Powergrid said it was still surveying the damage from Storm Corrie but noted that the impact appeared to be much less than during Storm Arwen in November due to the absence of snow and ice.

DNOs were heavily criticised for their responses to Storm Arwen, in particular, for providing customers with unrealistically optimistic estimates for restoration times.

Northern Powergrid said it has taken efforts to prevent this happening again, including temporarily disabling its automatic text message updates to avoid sending out automatically generated estimates. It also replaced its usual power cut map with a simplified power cut logging facility, which is able to deal with higher volumes of traffic and does not automatically generate restoration estimates. Northern Powergrid said its power cut map was switched back on once it had a clearer picture of the effects of the storms.

Northern Powergrid director Paul Glendinning said: “We are within sight of the end. But we still have a lot to do to get the last 4,000 customers reconnected having confirmed that around 200 damage points remain. Restoring these smaller incidents reconnects only a small number of customers for each job.”

Andy Bilclough, director of field operations, said: “Our team is ready to go and we’ve cancelled all the planned work in the rest of the company to release more resources. Other than the inevitable few surprises that always get uncovered at the end of a storm restoration, we have the work planned out for them. We are shooting to get it all done today – we know how difficult it is for our customers to be without power for three days.”

Storm Malik also cut power supplies to around 23,000 customers of SP Energy Networks and 8,000 customers of Electricity North West. The DNOs said all of these customers were reconnected by Sunday.

National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) said the weekend storms brought a new record for wind generation on Saturday, which it provisionally estimated at 19.5GW. The ESO said wind turbines produced more than half of Britain’s power (51.8%) over the full day.

Aurora Energy Research said wind output peaked at more than 20GW in the early hours of Saturday, accounting for over four fifths (81%) of total generation at the time.