UPDATE: Electricity Outages in Downtown Bar Harbor Not Because of Grid Overload
Chamber gets answers from Versant
BAR HARBOR—After multiple power outages in downtown Bar Harbor concentrated during the height of the summer season, Alf Anderson, executive director of the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce reached out to Versant to find out from the power company what was happening.
"I just spoke with Versant and got some more detail on what caused the outages last week,” Anderson wrote in an email to the Bar Harbor Story. “They assured me that it was not a matter of the grid being overmatched and it was not a failure of the redundancy put in place when the new station was built.”
Versant told Anderson that the problem was a distribution issue at the circuit level on the line down on the West Street corridor. That circuit, which is the last leg in the delivery to homes and businesses, had malfunctioned due to the increased demand from that area.
Anderson said, “They repaired the circuit and rebalanced the power load to avoid having this happen again."
The representative from Versant may be reaching out to the Town Manager to see about getting on a future Town Council agenda in order to address the situation.
“The process of having to shut everything down, explain to our guests that we are unable to feed them, and to contact everyone on our waitlist is very stressful,” Heather Sorokin, owner of the Thirsty Whale had said. “Versant states that the power loss is due to over demand. I have heard that they have a temporary fix. I can only say that the people in the business community that I have spoken with are very nervous going forward. Demand will not go down in the foreseeable future and continued loss of revenue during the height of the season will be difficult to recover from for everyone.”
OTHER SOURCES:
For our original article, click here.
https://apnews.com/article/d803dbc41ded7ef93226e89e982e1726
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2014/07/17/news/power-goes-out-again-in-bar-harbor/