Adrienne Lamb, owner of Taste Central Otago, was one of several Alexandra residents who contacted the Otago Daily Times outraged the lines company was continuing with scheduled maintenance and pole replacement despite the region being hit with biting winter conditions.
"I just think it’s inappropriate that they are doing this," she said.
"I think they shouldn’t be doing planned outages where people are left with no heating, water, for a whole day.
"It was -4degC at 9am [earlier this week]. I think they shouldn’t be doing any planned outages for a day in June, July, August."
It was also school holidays and more people were at home and needing to keep warm, she said.
"I just feel they really have missed that point."
Outages had a big impact on her food and produce business, and while Aurora had agreed to supply a generator for today’s scheduled outage — from 8.30am to 4.30pm — it was not as simple as plugging in a generator, she said.
Other Alexandra residents contacted the ODT to say they were concerned outages were continuing while many people were home isolating with Covid-19 and the flu, and in the middle of school holidays.
"Much of our work is necessary to replace or maintain equipment across our network, and it’s also necessary to ensure we have the capacity to support the future needs of our customers as we shift to increased electrification."
The size of the work programme meant work could not be deferred to only the summer months.
"We need to strike a balance between completing the work as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, whilst minimising the impact of supply interruptions to our customers — particularly during the colder months."
Plans were closely reviewed and outages would be cancelled and rescheduled if weather was very bad and the work could be safely deferred, he said.
"This has to be a judgement call made by the Aurora Energy team closer to the time of scheduled work, and we reiterate that with the amount of work we need to complete across our electricity network in Central Otago/Wanaka, Queenstown Lakes and Dunedin, we simply cannot defer all our planned work during winter months."
Cancelled work had a knock-on effect for the following winter as well as Aurora’s work programme in general.
"As an example, we chose to proceed with a planned outage in Alexandra today because the weather conditions were warmer than the last few days and it was safe for our contractors to proceed with replacing poles that are at their end of life," he said yesterday.
