National Grid Power Outages

Severe ice storms have knocked out power supplies in New York and New England affecting over 1 million homes and businesses according to Reuters:

"NEW YORK, Dec 12 (Reuters) - A powerful snow and ice storm knocked out power to nearly 1 million homes and businesses across New York and New England on Friday, closing roads and forcing the state of Maine to shut government offices."

The following is a memo from Charter spokesman Tom Cohan :

I just wanted to alert you to the fact that Charter Communications has crews out throughout central and western MA maintaining our service and restoring outages that have resulted from the ice storm we are experiencing. The biggest challenges are in the city of Worcester and the towns immediately surrounding Worcester where there are extensive power outages. Our crews need to wait for fallen electric lines to be repaired and electric service to be restored before we can check lines and get out service back up and running.

We will have extra crews working throughout the weekend because much of our work will take place after National Grid completes their service restoration.

At those of our headends that have lost commercial power, we have back-up generators running. For the most part, if a Charter customer has power they are continuing to receive all of their Charter services.

In Maine, at least 100,000 were without power early Friday and the number was expected to grow, said Iberdrola SA's (IBE.MC: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Central Maine Power Co, which serves about 1.6 million customers in New York and Maine.

Maine Gov. John Baldacci shut government offices in the state, citing weather and power outages.

In Vermont, ISO New England, the regional grid operator, asked Entergy Corp (ETR.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to reduce the output of the 620-megawatt Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor from full power to about 82 percent early Friday and to stop transmitting power to Northfield, Massachusetts. (Additional reporting by Jason Szep in Boston and Brian Early in Manchester, New Hampshire. Editing by Jason Szep and Marguerita Choy)

This is a great time to look into your own power supply using natural means, that is solar and wind energy and make savings on your Electric bill at the same time. Read about it here