With dozens of fires burning throughout greater Sydney, including 15 in the metropolitan area, utilities such as EnergyAustralia are warning that they will not be able to guarantee supply until the current crisis eases.
According to a statement released by EnergyAustralia's managing director Paul Broad customers across the Sydney region began experiencing power sags or dips yesterday afternoon, caused by fires burning close to or under major transmission lines operated by both EnergyAustralia and TransGrid south-west and north of the city.
"These major transmission lines run through forested areas on the city's boundaries, bringing power to the CBD and suburbs via EnergyAustralia's own distribution system," Broad said.
Uninterrupted power supply systems vendor APC registered just under 40 power sags, of a sufficiently long duration to cause data loss on the first day of the fires, with the number rising to more than 50 today.
John Thornell, Director of APC, Asia Pacific says such interruptions cause corrupted files and real-time data loss.
"Computers can handle anything below a 40 to 50 millisecond gap in the power supply, but we are experiencing interruptions beyond that, as well as total power failures throughout the Sydney CBD," Thornell said. "Initially power protection was about protecting computing hardware from the damage caused by surges. However, in the current climate where data and uptime is often more valuable to a company than the hardware itself, sags represent a very real threat to business continuity."
Companies with their national networks hosted in the Sydney CBD would be most at risk, according to Glen Noble, general manager of Macquarie Hosting Solutions, as the power outages would affect their ability to operate on a national and perhaps international basis.
"Most corporates can't afford to have the redundancies they need in place for this kind of emergency," Noble said. "If the power goes down in Sydney, offices throughout Australia would have to wait for servers and routers to resynchronise, affecting their ability to do business."
Noble said it would be impossible to calculate the full cost of the fires to Australian business, as companies would be reluctant to reveal the extent of the damage suffered due to a lack of business continuity planning.
"It will take a while to count the losses, but it might finally force IT departments to sit down and rethink their business continuity plans," Noble said. "There is an increasing tendency for liability for such failures to be placed with upper management, so the fires may well result in companies doing a rethink of their disaster recovery strategies, data access redundancies and so forth."
According to EnergyAustralia's Broad there is an ongoing risk of power interruptions as long as the fires threaten to bring down power lines in metropolitan Sydney.
"Fires in the immediate proximity of these high voltage lines will trigger the network's protection system, which is designed to protect the integrity of supply to all customers. The system activates when it detects a fault and then automatically restarts if the fault is clear," Broad said. "We appreciate this is frustrating for customers and businesses but unfortunately it is an unavoidable side-effect of the bushfires that have surrounded Sydney".
