Gloria Shae died following a blackout in the central west of NSW earlier this month.
Brian Shae said his 80-year-old mother was found “on the floor, leaning against the bedside tables deceased” on the morning of May 8.
Mr Shae said she was a registered life support customer with Origin Energy and Essential Energy when the blackout occurred shortly after 5am.
He said the company did not contact him to let him know there was a power outage in the Dubbo area.
“If they need to do maintenance, they’ll notify the next of kin – there is nothing in place when there is a blackout,” Mr Shae told the Daily Telegraph.
Mr Shae said his mother was registered so the family could have more reassurance.
“If my grandson hadn’t woken me up in the morning letting me know that the TV was off I wouldn’t have known there was a power outage and probably gone in at 10am and expecting to have a coffee with her,” he said.
Mr Shae said his mother was probably trying to reach oxygen she had stored in bottles but fell.
Emergency services arrived about 15 minutes after she was found and revived her heart but Mr Shae said “her brain was already dead at that point”.
Essential Energy said the unplanned power outage occurred about 5am when a member of the public reported sparks from a transformer on a power pole.
“To ensure public safety, Essential Energy remotely de-energised the local network,” a company spokesperson told AAP.
“A field team was dispatched to the site and undertook repairs so that power could be restored as safely and quickly as possible.”
The power company said supply was interrupted twice for “short durations” and fully restored about one hour after the fault was first reported.
“It is the nature of unplanned outages that they occur without notice and are of an unknown duration,” the spokesperson said.
The company encouraged customers who rely on a continuous power supply to operate medical equipment to seek advice from their medical practitioner and “have contingency plans in place”.
Health Minister Ryan Park described the incident as a “terrible tragedy” and said he has spoken with NSW Health and encouraged energy companies to look into ways they could better support vulnerable customers.
“These type of tragic events are an opportunity to be quite blunt, to learn about what we can do better to support vulnerable customers,” he told reporters in Dubbo on Wednesday.
“I believe there is an opportunity here for energy companies to do better and I will be encouraging them to have a look at that.
“If there’s anything that we could have done differently, we will look at that.”