KEY POINTS:
By necessity Transpower finds itself living by the motto: "It's the putting-right that counts."
Gold-plated transmission systems with hideously expensive backups every step of the way for any contingency disappeared in the 1960s. Rather than rely on prevention, Transpower works on the assumption its transmission system will break down somewhere, so it works on the cure - a quick response and recovery.
As besieged chief executive Patrick Strange has put it: "We don't know how it will fail but we'd better plan how we're going to recover."
Anyone who's been stuck in traffic chaos, seen food defrost in the freezer or closed up shop this week will have their own views on how the taxpayer-owned company is doing.
The power was off for around two hours, 20 minutes - but it was the scale that hurt and the unsettling reminder of just how fragile Auckland's power infrastructure is.
Strange is familiar with a February crisis in Auckland. He walked into a job 12 years ago at retailer Mercury Energy and a few months later was confronted by the worst crisis (so far) to hit the city - the catastrophic failure of underground cables leading to the CBD.
Some cables were old but the rest were new and thought to be utterly reliable, contributing to the view there's a role for plain bad luck in power transmission.
Transpower is frank about the state of the grid - parts of which are 70 years old - from which it still earned $640 million last year, returning a profit of $108 million.
The network of substations, underground and undersea cables and power pylons has been suffering from years of under-investment. In the 1990s the big hope was small-scale local generation not requiring major transmission lines - planners adopted a "glide path" of no new major investment.
Power use increased and new gear was required so Transpower hiked prices to pay for it, sparking a rumble with the Commerce Commission, which threatened to take it over.
Plans to put massive pylons across the Waikato to bolster security of supply in Auckland ran into fury among landowners and a stumbling block in the Electricity Commission, which must approve major projects.
But, depending on resource consents, the state-owned enterprise will spend $3.8 billion on the grid in the next five years. To do that it's putting up prices, has been spared from paying a dividend to the Government for a few years and will double its debt to $2 billion.
To those still fuming about the cuts over the past two days, that's a lot - too late.
