Over 16,000 people briefly lose power across Newfoundland in abrupt widespread outage | CBC News

Over 16,000 Newfoundland Power customers were briefly in the dark Monday afternoon following unexpected outages that spanned the island, from St. John’s in the east to as far west as Stephenville.

Most outages started at 2:21 p.m., according to Newfoundland Power’s website. A total of 16,118 people were listed as affected by the loss of power, without a cause cited.

In a tweet following the outages, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro called it an under-frequency load-shedding event — which is when the system cuts power to some customers to balance itself out during an unexpected loss of generation. 

An email to CBC News from Hydro said the event was caused by a trip of the Labrador Island Link and Hydro’s Soldiers Pond terminal station just outside St. John’s.

About 31 megawatts, or five per cent of the overall supply, was lost from the system, Hydro said, and the outage was about seven minutes long.

Load-shedding events are designed to protect the system from widespread damage, and the customer blocks that are affected are pre-determined, according to Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro’s website.

A load-shedding event caused a similar outage in January during a malfunction of the Maritime Link, which connects Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

The link has also caused load-shedding events before, when a failed attempt to move 700 megawatts through its transmission towers caused an outage, affecting about 60,000 customers in November 2022.

The transmission system also faced several software issues during its development but passed its final test leading to the commissioning of the Muskrat Falls project in April.

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