A very limited number of sites are protected from emergency power cuts. These are typically locations which are deemed to be critical infrastructure, such as air traffic control centres and major hospital facilities with accident and emergency departments.
It is important to note that residential customers, including those on the NIE Networks Medical Customer Care Register and businesses without backup generation and which are not listed as “protected” by the government, would not be exempt.
The actions described in ESEC are not used to handle sudden shortfalls in generation, or to deal with day-to-day repair and recovery of faulty or damaged parts of the transmission and distribution networks. During such events, sites included on the protected sites list may well still experience interruption to their electricity supplies.
