Heavy rain and lightning strikes caused power outages for hundreds of Nova Scotia Power customers on Wednesday.

As of 11:30 a.m., 1745 customers — the majority in Dartmouth — were without power, according to the utility. The cause of the Dartmouth outage was not clear.

At 8:30 a.m., 779 customers in Bridgewater, Clare, Shelburne and Yarmouth were without power. Those in Clare, Shelburne and Yarmouth had been without electricity since Tuesday night.

Neera Ritcey, a spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power, said the utility is hoping all of the electricity will be restored by 11 a.m.

"There's been a lot of individual, scattered outages that went on overnight," she told CBC News on Wednesday.

"Given the kind of weather they were dealing with, thunder and lightning, obviously they have to ensure that they're working safely and are spending the right amount of time doing the repairs that are needed."

Earlier on Wednesday, damage to overhead equipment caused another outage in the Burnside Industrial Park at about 5:15 a.m. Power there was restored by about 7:30 a.m.

Meanwhile, Ritcey said 20 power line technicians and several supervisors left for Connecticut on Tuesday night to help restore power to some of the more than 8.2 million people left without electricity after Hurricane Sandy.

She said there are enough repair people left in Nova Scotia to allow them to help out.

"A big part of our planning is to ensure we've got enough capacity here in Nova Scotia when we make those decisions," Ritcey said.

"We assist to the extent that we can for the efforts where the need is the highest. These decisions have always been made factoring in how the weather is looking. We do detailed weather modelling continually and so the crews going to Connecticut will be able to help out there, where we have enough capacity here."