'Ageing infrastructure and rural nature of NI' factors in long Storm Eowyn blackouts says professor
At time of writing on Friday 6,500 properties were still without power a full week after the storm passed.
Some may not have the lights back on until Monday.
The News Letter has sought to find out why, given that all of Scotland's customers had their electricity back on from Thursday.
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According to media reports, during the storm about 310,000 customers lost power in Scotland.
In Northern Ireland the figure was 283,000.
NI Electricity (NIE) has said that, because Northern Ireland has a significantly smaller population than Scotland, those 283,000 customers who lost power represent a much higher proportion of the total than in Scotland.
Asked why he believes Northern Ireland had endured longer and proportionately greater powercuts than elsewhere, Neil Hewitt, a professor of energy at Ulster University, said: "I've a few theories.
"One of them is the fact a lot of our network was upgraded back in the day - 70s, 80s, 90s, that sort of thing.
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Hide Ad"Secondly we've a lot of low-voltage distributing network because we're a very distributed population, so it's vulnerable in that respect.
"It's above ground, it's not buried in any way."
If high-voltage lines are veins, then low-voltage lines could be thought of as capillaries, each carrying power to a relatively small number of customers.
"The majority of the images I've seen is low-voltage stuff that's failed, it's not the high-voltage network," said Prof Hewitt.
"We just have a lot of it, and a lot of it was upgraded many years ago, when I was a youngster."
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Hide AdHe said upgrades to this "ageing infrastructure" rely partly on what people pay in their electricity bills, "which the Utility Regulator oversees, so that limits the amount of money that NIE can put into the infrastructure".
Did NIE underperform?
"I genuinely believe they did the best they could with what they've got," he said. "Everything they had was out there. The question is: do they have enough?"
Ulster University economist Esmond Birnie said: "If the view is taken that we should invest more, it will mean higher prices to the consumer.
"There's no point any politician getting on to his or her soapbox and banging the drum about 'we need better cabling or underground wires or whatever'. Maybe we do. But they need to be honest with the electorate and say: 'you will be paying for this'."
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Hide AdJohn Wylie, a Met Office forecaster of over 40 years' experience, said the last time NI faced a comparable storm was Boxing Day 1998.
What made Eowyn particularly brutal was its "prolonged nature" and the high frequency of gusts.
"The higher the ratio of gusts to mean speed, the greater the potential for damage,” he said.
Alex Houston, NIE's network operations manager, was asked why NI had taken longer than Scotland to get customers back online.
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Hide Ad"The most comparable Scottish company is SSE, that looks after the north of Scotland," he said.
"They had around 92,000 customers out, with a population customer base roughly similar to our own.
"So they probably had about 10% of their customers off. We had 30% of our customers off.
"Certainly they experienced some very strong wind speeds as well but it wasn't the same level of intensity, the same longevity of an event for them.
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Hide Ad"We've now restored... a much higher percentage of customers than they've had to restore… I hope when people see our response they can see that we are putting absolutely everything into this."
On the topic of investment, NIE said: “Whilst parts of the electricity network in NI were built in the 1960s we invest approx £160m annually on maintaining and upgrading the network, and it is benchmarked against other UK industry standards to ensure it remains in a safe and reliable condition…
"Our investment plans are subject to stakeholder engagement and regulatory scrutiny to ensure a safe, reliable and affordable network for NI customers.”