The Northern Territory chief minister says a review will be conducted into a widespread power outage in the Top End on Monday afternoon caused by gas supply issues.
The power outage affected about 20,000 customers across 19 suburbs in Darwin, Palmerston and Katherine for about two hours, according to Power and Water, the NT government-owned electricity provider.
Residential properties, businesses, large supermarkets, and traffic lights were all impacted.
Power and Water executive general manager Michael Besselink said the outage, which started about 5.40pm, was "a result of a localised interruption to gas supply at a few generating units at the Channel Island Power Station".
"The generators at Channel Island run on gas … as soon as the supply of gas stops then the generators stop," he told ABC Radio Darwin on Tuesday morning.
"The Power and Water team worked with the Territory Generation team and progressively restored power to the customers and around 7.50pm all the power was safely restored."
Mr Besselink said the outage was not caused by a lack of overall gas supply to Channel Island, but was likely due to a “localised issue” near the power station.
APA, the company that owns the Amadeus Gas Pipeline which transports natural gas to Darwin, said it had "experienced an event" that led to the power outage.
"[This] resulted in us being unable to deliver the full supply of gas to the Channel Island Power Station," an APA spokesperson said in a statement.
"We acknowledge the impact this outage has had on Territorians and apologise for the inconvenience caused."
The company said an investigation into what occurred was underway.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Eva Lawler said there would be a review into the cause of the gas supply interruption.
NT facing long-term gas supply issues
Channel Island is usually supplied by gas from Eni's Blacktip gas field, but supply from the field has dipped so much in the past two years that Power and Water has been sourcing gas from LNG export plants in Darwin Harbour to keep the station's generators running.
Because of these issues, the NT government has turned to Santos to supply the last of its gas from its Bayu-Undan field, which delivered its last export shipment in December last year.
Eni is contracted to supply gas to Power and Water until 2034 in an agreement worth $5.5 billion, but Ms Lawler said the government was looking elsewhere for gas supply.
"Obviously Eni have had difficulty supplying gas. We will continue to access gas from a range of suppliers across the Northern Territory," she told ABC Radio Darwin on Tuesday.
"Towards the end of the year and into the future we hope to be able to also have gas from the Beetaloo as well."