A takeaway business near Wānaka had to rush out to borrow a generator this morning as a power cut left it and hundreds of other customers without power.
Power was cut to 1156 properties around Albert Town and Lake Hāwea about 5.40am.
Aurora Energy said the cause of the power cut was being looked into.
At midday the number without power had been reduced to fewer than 40 properties.
One of those was Ravi Singh, who owns Wingin' It takeaways in Lake Hāwea.
He said the power cut had led to a busy morning.
"They are causing problems. We have two fridges, two freezers which are not working right now. We had to go and get a new generator. So everything is turned on now, just now.
"But it has been off for a little while, and we were worried about our stock. We don't even know if we will be able to open and serve people."
He said they could not fully operate with the generator, so were hoping to get the power restored as soon as possible.
Aurora Energy said it took longer to restore power because of fire restrictions currently in place.
The automatic reclosers that help get the power back on quickly after a short outage could potentially create sparks if the network had been damaged during a fault, it said.
When a prohibited fire season is declared, Aurora disables the automatic reclosers to reduce the fire risk.
When the reclosers were disabled the fault crews had to manually check the lines to make sure everything was safe before they could turn the power back on.
It was a trade-off between getting power restored faster, and the risk of fire, Aurora Energy said.
