Power firms have been told to improve their emergency response after Storm Arwen left more than one million homes without power last year.
Energy regulator Ofgem said this morning that failings resulted in nearly 4,000 homes having to cope in appalling conditions without power for over a week.
The storm brought 100mph wind, rain and snow across North-east Scotland at the end of November.
Ofgem boss Jonathan Brearley told power firms to "up your game" and "get ready for winter".
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, he said companies needed to maintain and invest in power networks better, communicate better with customers about outages and be more imaginative about how they get people back on supply.
The storm caused widespread damage, with high winds snapping or uprooting trees that fell onto overhead lines.
Mr Brearley said while network companies faced "challenging conditions" following the storm, it was "unacceptable" that almost 4,000 homes were off power for over a week, often without accurate information as to when power would be restored".
He added: "Network companies need to do better, not just to prevent power disruptions, but to ensure that when power is off, they work smarter to get people back on power quicker, and keep customers informed with accurate and timely information. This is the very least customers should be able to expect.
"The frequency of extreme weather events is only set to increase so it is really important that industry, and those involved more widely, learn from Storm Arwen to better respond in future."
The full report can be found here.
The main findings of the review are:
- Some affected customers remained off power for an unacceptable amount of time, received poor communication from their network operator and compensation payments took too long.
- Whilst companies initiated their emergency plans before the storm hit, the plans were not sufficient to deal with the scale of damage that resulted from Storm Arwen.
- One DNO, Northern Powergrid (NPg), did not directly contact vulnerable customers enrolled on its Priority Services Register (PSR) prior to Storm Arwen. This should have been carried out as part of its planned winter preparedness campaign.
- NPg accepted the performance of its call centre fell below the standards it should have been able to meet during a severe storm. This could be a potential breach to licence condition, SLC 8.3(b) & (c), which relates to the availability and operation of their call centre.
- Limited remote monitoring on the lower voltage networks hindered DNOs from understanding the full scale and complexity of faults, impacting the number of resources they initially deployed to undertake repairs, restore power and support customers.
- Most network faults during Storm Arwen were caused by strong winds or trees and branches falling onto power lines. Ofgem additionally found some correlation between poles that were damaged and their age, although this needs further investigation.
- Customer research and stakeholder feedback told Ofgem that many customers had to endure a very long wait to have their power restored, had to deal with poor and sometimes inaccurate communications with the network operator, and had to endure long delays in receiving compensation, which is not acceptable.
- 28% of customers were given a restoration time that was not within 24 hours of their actual restoration time, and some affected customers did not think that the support available was made clear to them.