Scottish Hydro Electric Power Distribution (SHEPD) would like to apologise to affected customers and thank them for their patience while power was restored to their homes. SHEPD communicated with customers during this rare outage and worked closely with National Grid and the Scottish Government throughout.
The power cut affected 205,000 customers in areas including Inverness, Caithness and Sutherland, Orkney and the Western Isles.
SHEPD's network contingency procedures worked effectively and teams reacted quickly, this resulted in the majority of homes in Inverness being affected for under one hour, with the last home being restored within three hours in Caithness. A helicopter is patrolling the line this morning with support of ground patrols to survey the network for any potential damage.
Alan Broadbent Head of Engineering said: "Last night our top priority was to restore power quickly and safely, since then our teams continue to work on the technical analysis required to identify the cause of this highly unusual fault. There are a number of avenues of enquiry currently being explored with the investigation now narrowed down to an area of overhead transmission line of approximately 90km between Blackhillock and Knocknagael."
Over the next few years SHEPD will be investing around £2bn in their transmission network which is 99.9% reliable.