Niagara Mohawk, a National Grid company, announced late Thursday evening that power has been restored to customers across its service area who were affected by the major outage that swept the Northeastern U.S. earlier in the day. At the height of the outage, approximately 1.25 million of the company's 1.5 million electricity customers were without power.
Niagara Mohawk will continue to work with government officials, regulators and other utilities in gathering and analyzing data so that the root cause of the outages can be determined.
In the meantime, the company continues to ask its customers to reduce all unnecessary electricity usage so that adequate electricity supply can be preserved across the state.
Steps that residential customers can take are: Use fans instead of air conditioners to cool homes. If fans are not an option, set air conditioners at higher temperatures. Close shades and blinds to keep homes cooler. Limit use of major appliances such as electric stoves, dishwashers, and clothes dryers. Turn off unnecessary lights.
Niagara Mohawk power grid provides electric service to approximately 1.5 million customers and natural gas service to approximately 540,000 customers in upstate New York. The company is based in Syracuse. Its parent company also has electricity distribution operations in New England.