Lightning was suspected as the cause of a 50-minute power outage Wednesday afternoon that knocked out power to nearly half a million people on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in the western part of the Bronx, Consolidated Edison Co. of New York (ConEd) said last week. The utility also was blitzed by more outages in other parts of the city following severe thunderstorms later Wednesday night.

Shortly before 4 p.m. EDT Wednesday, power in parts of the two boroughs went down, disrupting subway service on several of the city’s busiest lines on the Upper East Side and in the western part of the Bronx. Service at the Metro-North Railroad, which runs from the Bronx to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, also was disrupted, officials said.

The New York City Transit Authority said the “power dip” affected train signals, which forced the transit authority to keep the trains in the stations during one of the busiest times of the day. The trains are powered by direct current, and there were no problems getting the stalled trains into the stations so that passengers could leave, a spokesman said. However, the subway signals are powered by alternating current supplied by Con Edison. Major delays were reported from New York City into Connecticut and New Jersey as service was restored.

ConEd CEO Kevin Burke said in a news conference that the utility had traced the power failure to the company’s substation in Astoria in Queens. He said circuit breakers opened, which caused a break in transmission to substations on the Upper East Side and in the West Bronx. Alarms sounded at the Astoria substation, which led supervisors to notify city officials, who then sent additional police officers to direct traffic. ConEd employees checked the equipment, and when they found no damage, they began to power up the transmission lines again.

Burke said that ConEd could not guarantee that similar problems might occur this summer. However, he noted that the problem was not caused by an extreme power load, even though it was the second day in a row of 90-plus degree temperatures.

“There will be additional thunderstorms, and trees will fall down,” Burke said. But “the customers have a lot of confidence in us. They understand that problems could occur.”

To ensure grid reliability following last year’s power outages in Queens, ConEd said in March it had invested $1.4 billion in its electric delivery infrastructure. And in June, Con Edison unveiled a massive new substation complex in the Bronx as part of its overall building program to meet the energy needs of its nine million New York customers. The facility in Mott Haven, which houses two substations, delivers about 900 MW to the Bronx and other parts of the utility’s service area. Three other substations are now under construction in New York City and Westchester County.

The utility was roundly criticized last year following a nine-day blackout from July 17 to July 25, which knocked out power to nearly 174,000 people in parts of Queens and in Westchester County (see Power Market Today, July 25, 2006). Another power outage followed over Labor Day weekend in September during a severe storm (see Power Market Today, Sept. 8, 2006).

The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) earlier this year issued an assessment by the Department of Public Service on recommendations to improve Con Edison’s restoration and customer service performance (see NGI, March 5 ). And in June, the PSC ordered the utility to perform an independent assessment of its revised demand response program and to report the results by Jan. 1 (see NGI, June 18).

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