Meredith power outage caused by failed transformer

PLYMOUTH — A power outage affecting approximately 6,500 members of New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) on Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 3:25 p.m. was caused by equipment failure at the company's Meredith substation. The outage was unrelated to the damage caused by the weekend snowstorm, which left 13,000 NHEC members without power.

The outage affected members in Meredith, Center Harbor, Holderness, New Hampton and Gilford. Power was restored within 50 minutes by re-routing power to the affected area from the Corliss Hill and Center Harbor substations. This is a temporary fix, however, and NHEC is making plans to move its mobile substation transformer to the Meredith substation, where it will be put into service next week.

The outage was caused by the failure of the Meredith substation transformer, which reduces the voltage of the electricity coming into the substation from 34,000 volts to 15,000. The transformer was installed in 1986 but was not near the end of its expected lifetime. It will undergo a series of tests to determine the cause of the failure. In the meantime, NHEC’s mobile transformer will remain in service until the damaged unit is repaired or replaced.