10,000’s of Territorians were without power last night, with an outage leaving homes and businesses cut off for several hours. A review will now take place into the widespread blackouts that were triggered by gas supply issues to the grid.
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TVTranscript
00:00 A shaky start to the week.
00:04 Just beginning the night and the power goes out.
00:08 Randy's Nightcliff Burger Shop forced to turn customers away and close early after being
00:13 plunged into darkness.
00:15 It is a little frustrating for us as a business to just stop working as soon as that happens.
00:22 And she wasn't alone.
00:23 Houses, supermarkets, even traffic lights impacted through the course of the evening.
00:28 The widespread power cuts affected 20,000 customers across Darwin, Palmerston and Catherine.
00:35 Power and Water says the outage began at 5.40 in the afternoon and was restored just before
00:40 8pm as the top end sweltered through humid conditions above 30 degrees.
00:46 The NT government is now promising a review into the incident.
00:49 Power and Water blaming a localised gas supply issue near Channel Island Power Station, triggered
00:55 by an incident on a pipeline owned by company APA.
00:59 They did have some technical issues and they've come out very strongly today and I want to
01:02 acknowledge that around the issues that they have had.
01:06 Here in the territory we can't even keep the lights on for 250,000 people despite the abundance
01:12 of resource that we have.
01:14 There have been warnings for years that the NT's electrical grid is vulnerable and desperately
01:18 needs upgrades to ensure its resilience.
01:20 A complicating factor in all this is that the gas field that supplies the territory's
01:24 largest power stations hasn't been putting out as much gas as previously anticipated,
01:29 meaning the NT government has to spend more in order to keep the lights on.
01:33 But all that businesses like Paddy Shack can do...
01:36 Friday and Saturdays being our biggest nights, if that happens then we lose a lot of our
01:41 revenue for the night and the week.
01:43 ...is be thankful it wasn't worse.
01:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]