Northern Territory chief minister Eva Lawler says there will be review conducted into a widespread power outage that affected 20,000 customers across Darwin, Palmerston and Katherine on Monday afternoon.
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Territory-owned utility Power and Water said the outage impacted residences, businesses, supermarkets, and traffic lights, and was the result of a localised interruption to gas supply at Channel Island Power Station.
“The generators at Channel Island run on gas … as soon as the supply of gas stops then the generators stop,” Power and Water executive general manager Michael Besselink told ABC Radio.
“The Power and Water team worked with the Territory Generation team and progressively restored power to the customers and around 7.50pm all the power was safely restored.”
Besselink said the outage was not caused by a lack of gas supply but was likely due to a “localised issue” near Channel Island Power Station.
APA, owner of the pipeline that transports natural gas to Darwin, confirmed it had experienced an event that triggered the outage.
“[This] resulted in us being unable to deliver the full supply of gas to the Channel Island Power Station,” an APA spokesperson said in a statement.
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“We acknowledge the impact this outage has had on Territorians and apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
The company said an investigation into the incident was underway.
