By: Cassie Petrizzio
NYC’s major blackout last weekend leaves Con Ed admittedly baffled. On Monday July 15th, the electric company warned that more blackouts could be imminent thanks to the upcoming heatwave. “We expect that there could be service outages — those things happen during heat waves,” said Con Ed’s chief spokesman, Mike Clendenin, during a morning appearance on PIX11. He said the power company invests roughly $2 billion annually to prepare for mounting electricity needs when the temperature rises. Clendenin said Con Ed will be “prepared.”
“We know it’s going to be intense,” said Clendenin, referring to the weather forecasts for the week which predict that temperatures will reach 100 degrees. “This heat wave coming up is something else and we’ve got to get ready for it.”
As reported by the NY Post, Clendenin admitted that Saturday’s outage was not caused by the heat and that the company’s engineers still do not know the reason for the outage, which left 73,000 NYC customers in the dark from West 30th to West 72nd streets, between the Hudson River and Fifth Avenue. “We are very, very focused on examining exactly what transpired and caused that outage,” Clendenin he said, saying they have yet to figure out why the breakers “did not isolate the problem”.
“In terms of the root cause, we have a team full-time on it working now. It takes time,” Con Ed President Timothy Cawley said at a news conference near the company’s Upper West Side Energy Control Center. While no one was hurt as a result of the blackout, more than 400 elevators got stuck, and about 2,800 people had to be rescued from subway trains that got stranded.
“There’s a lot of patience and poise that New Yorkers displayed during the outage itself. The same kind of patience and diligence is gonna be needed as engineers and experts dive into the date and actually analyze how equipment tripped off, or what went wrong, that led to the large outage,” said Clendenin. “Unfortunately, with outages like this, it takes a little bit of time and understanding.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo sent a warning to Con Ed on Sunday , saying that Con Edison “does not have a franchise granted by God”. “We’re getting to the point where Con Ed is going to have to deliver or we’re going to have to find a different delivery mechanism. The governor added, “They can be replaced”.
Clendenin did his best to dismiss criticism for the company, maintaining that Con Ed provides “the absolute best grid that New Yorkers expect and deserve.”
“In fact, New York’s grid is probably better than any other grid you’ll find anywhere else in the United States,” he continued, adding that the company was “open to anyone’s ideas” on how to further improve.
