Unless the multi-million beach house he’s renting for the holidays has a backup generator, President-elect Barack Obama is without power this evening. Widespread outages began hitting the island of Oahu, home to over 800,000 people, around 6:45 p.m local time and may last for twelve hours.

Peter Rosegg, a Heco spokesman, said the outages could last about 12 hours and happened during an electrical storm. “It is going to be a long, dark night, and that’s the bad news,” he said on KSSK.

He said they were having to restart the generators from scratch so it is going to take hours…

The outage also closed stores at major retail outlets just after sunset, halting post-Christmas shopping a couple of hours early.

Mayor Mufi Hannemann said he received word from police that Obama is OK. Hannemann said in an interview with KSSK radio that Obama is in one of the “most secure places, so he’ll be OK.”

Heco officials said that apparent lightning strikes triggered so-called “load shedding” — an automatic shutting down of power area after area on Oahu to prevent a catastrophic shutdown of the entire system. One plant, Kahe 4, was working for a couple of hours giving power to Makakilo and parts of Waianae. However that plant also went out about 8:30, making the blackout islandwide.

Inbound flights to Honolulu Airport are arriving as planned, but outgoing flights have been grounded until further notice. The airport is running on an emergency generator.