Power Outage notification for Niue

On the 18th September 2024, Niue’s new power station was brought online. This represents the culmination of years of work from Niue Power Corporation (NPC) staff, local and overseas contractors, and our development partners.

Australia and New Zealand funding assistance in particular has been instrumental in the procurement of new generators, transformers, switchboard and construction of a new building to house these.

The Government of Niue extends its sincere thanks to the staff of NPC, who have had to respond to outages at all hours of the night and have kept aging infrastructure in service with limited resources for over 10 years. Since commissioning the generators two week ago, they have been running smoothly and continuously, with no interruption to power generation.

Unfortunately, there remain faults in the network infrastructure, where some transformers, pillars and cables are nearing end-of-life. In other words, energy from the new station is distributed using very old infrastructure.

The NPC reticulation team are proactively replacing transformers and cables wherever possible, however with over 100km of power reticulation in Niue, this is a major task. Support from the GEF funded AREAN project, along with NZ’s commitment of $20 million for renewable energy are addressing the stability of Niue’s grid, funding the replacement of aging reticulation infrastructure. This work has started and will continue over the next 12 months.

During the commissioning trip from the 16th September 2024, replacement of lightning damaged components to the Tesla Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) were undertaken by Tesla technicians, however there are some final issues to be resolved before this comes back online. Similarly, Niue’s largest solar array (near the hospital) requires some inverters to be replaced. These are on-island, and replacement work will be carried out in the next few weeks. At this point, we will be able to bring a sizeable portion of solar back on the grid and reduce diesel consumption from running the generators full time.

It was anticipated that the month of October would be used to monitor the new station and address any issues before they arise. However, in the early hours of Tuesday 2nd October 2024, a fault on the Northern side of the Island caused the automatic shutdown of the new generators. Efforts to bring the Northern side of the Island back online could not successfully be done without, again, causing an automatic shutdown of the new generators. Therefore, last night the NPC Team have reverted to the old station to power the whole island. This is a temporary solution which the NPC Team will monitor closely, until issues are fully resolved along the Northern Feeder, from Matalave.

While grid stability issues are being resolved, there is still the possibility of unplanned outages. This is to be mitigated as far as possible by proactively replacing network equipment, and signalling planned outages to allow for households and businesses to plan in advance. NPC does not expect either planned or unplanned outages to be frequent, but wish to be as transparent on the current situation of our network.

Thank you for your patience and support, NPC understands that outages are disruptive, however the team will continue to work long hours towards greater continuity and reliability for everyone.

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