Community / SSEN engineers still repairing Storm Malik damage
THE COMPANY looking after the local electricity network has apologised for many short power cuts in recent days – saying it was all part of the essential and to an extent automated process of restoring full supplies following Storm Malik.
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) said even though Shetland escaped the worst of the storm, engineers have been out every day to repair damage to the network.
The overhead network at Sandness was extensively damaged by last week’s storm, SSEN said.
A spokesperson for the company added that new automated equipment had worked well in detecting faults and generally resulted in customers being reconnected more quickly.
He said new circuit breakers were working like trip switches in people’s houses. They disconnect power if a fault such as debris being blown into the overhead lines is detected.
They do this by attempting to automatically reconnect the power a number of times and if, after the final attempt, the fault is still present, the power will stay off and it is at this point automation will attempt to re-route power from an alternative part of the network.
This means as many customers as possible can be restored prior to SSEN engineers arriving on site to carry out repairs, the spokesperson said.
He added: “We’d like to apologise to our customers on Shetland who may have experienced interruptions to their power supply over the past week, and we’d like to assure everyone impacted that our engineers did all they could to get the power back on as safely and as quickly as possible.”
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