Critical Customers

Critical customers are those who provide services that are essential to the health, safety and welfare of the communities we serve. This includes hospitals, fire and police stations, acute care facilities, long-term care facilities, community warming centres, fuel storage, water treatment/pumping stations and other critical municipal infrastructure. These roles are particularly important during major electrical power outages due to storms or other events. Through discussions with health care authorities, fire and police services and government officials, Newfoundland Power determines which customers are critical.

Wherever possible, we work to prevent outages to critical customers. Sometimes, unexpected outages to these customers are unavoidable. However, we are able to minimize outages to these customers by:

• Giving top priority to critical customers when unplanned outages occur due to storms or other events.
• Avoiding critical customers during rotating power outages caused by lack of power supply.
• Not including critical customers in under-frequency loading shedding events, which can be necessary to restore balance to the electricity system when a large source of electricity is suddenly lost on the system.