Contact Energy (Contact) has said it will cover the daily fixed line charges incurred by
its customers who were impacted by last week's widespread power cuts in Northland and
the Far North.
More than 100,000 people were left without power after a Transpower pylon near Kaipara
collapsed last Thursday during routine maintenance on the tower. Contact has more than
20,000 customers who were impacted by the outage.
“We’re mindful of the impacts and disruption to our customers who were affected by the
transmission outage.” says CEO Mike Fuge.
“For us, it’s about doing the right thing. We have a responsibility to keep the lights on, and
when our customers are impacted by incidents out of their control, we need to step up and
do the right thing.”
Starting from tomorrow, Contact’s Northland and Far North customers will receive a text
message, or email, advising of automatic refunds to their electricity daily charge in relation to
last week’s outage. There is no need for impacted customers to get in touch, the refunds will
happen automatically in their next bill.
Contact is also donating $100,000 to local community groups in acknowledgment of the
impact to the two regions.
