Aurora Energy can't yet explain today's outage to 10,000 Upper Clutha homes

Aurora Energy is so far unable to explain why 10,000 homes and businesses in Upper Clutha experienced an unplanned power outage this morning.

It's customer manager Sian Sutton told Crux in a written statement today (January 8) that the company has started an investigation into the cause of the 8 am outage.

She says that Aurora was undertaking planned maintenance on one of its two supplies into the Upper Clutha region this morning, and Aurora experienced an outage on the remaining in-service supply.

During the power outage, the Aurora Energy also experienced a website failure. 

Ms Sutton told Crux that the large area involved in this morning’s power outage caused the Aurora website server to ‘hang’ while the data was uploading and this caused the website to freeze. The site had only recently been updated.

"Aurora Energy launched a new website last September with enhanced power outage information that includes automated updates and an outages map.... this scenario was tested prior to the site going live but not to the extent of this morning’s event."

The company is working on a permanent solution to their IT problems. 

Ms Sutton thanks customers for their understanding, especially when the outage impacted a large number of people in popular holiday hot spots.

The areas of Wānaka, Luggate, Lake Hāwea, Hāwea Flat and Tarras were affected.

"Our Network Operations team were able to return one supply back on within an hour and the second supply by mid-morning," Ms Sutton says.