Power supply outages are inflicting damage on firms
By Maurice Garvey
THE ESB is planning a continuity review of supply in the Clondalkin area in the coming months – following outages in March/February which left thousands of people without electricity and sparked complaints from residents.
A power outage on Monday, March 11, affected approximately 5,000 people in the Newlands area when a medium voltage overhead line connection failed.
The Clondalkin area has experienced a number of power outages.
In February, two faults were reported in Clondalkin, the initial fault leading to a secondary one.
According to the ESB, this can happen when network technicians are ‘fault-hunting’, where cables have to be switched in and out until the exact location of the fault is discovered, before repairs are carried out.
Fianna Fáil councillor Trevor Gilligan said power cuts were damaging to local businesses, and he has “never witnessed this many outages in such a short space of time.”
“As many as 6,000 homes were without electricity recently as an outage hit Clondalkin village,” said Cllr Gilligan.
“I was going into Aldi that morning (March 11) to get milk but it was all tapered off. I went over to Circle K but they also had a blackout and the lights were gone. Main traffic lights were out in Newlands and there would have been some amount of business lost during that period. A few weeks before, there was an outage on the Ninth Lock junction.”
Following representation from Cllr Trevor Gilligan, ESB Networks, said “protection devices did not work as it should have” during the March 11 outage, and technicians were delayed arriving on the scene “due to traffic problems around the village.”
“It took a while for our network technicians to get all the sectionalising of the cable completed in order to restore power supply to as many customers as possible before they could start working on the actual repair.”
A spokesperson for the ESB told The Echo they have “unfortunately experienced a number of faults in the Clondalkin area since the start of 2019.”
“Clondalkin is a busy and growing community, but these outages were not related to loading arrangements on its feeding stations. ESB Networks will carry out a continuity review for the North Dublin area, including Clondalkin, in the coming months, with a view to identifying areas for improvement by the year end.”
Meanwhile, ESB told The Echo they carried out works to resolve a “specific issue” in the Harelawn area of North Clondalkin, which suffered a number of power outages last summer.
