Outage schedules in Ukraine to be applied all day on Thursday, to be tightened during evening consumption peak - Ukrenergo

MOSCOW. July 18 (Interfax) - Ukrainian regional power operators will apply power supply restrictions simultaneously to two to four categories of power consumers on Thursday, Ukrainian media reported with reference to the national power grid operator Ukrenergo's statement on its social account.

Power supply will be cut simultaneously to two categories of consumers from 0:01 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., to three categories from 5:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and from 10:00 p.m. to midnight, and to four categories from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., it said.

Ukrenergo said at around noon on Thursday that, as equipment went out of order at two power infrastructure facilities, power supply would be cut simultaneously to four categories of consumers from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. in the city of Kiev and the Kiev region, in the Cherkassy, Chernigov, Zhitomir, Kharkov, Poltava, Sumy, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kirovograd regions, and in the Kiev-controlled parts of the Donetsk and Zaporozhye regions.

Ukrenergo said on Wednesday evening that it anticipated cutting power supply simultaneously to four categories of consumers in all regions of Ukraine from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Thursday.

"In other regions, limitations are to be applied in line with the previously announced schedule, that is, to four categories from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. and to three categories during the other hours," it said.

As of Thursday morning, 374 communities in the Kiev, Volyn, Zakarpattia, Zhitomir, Sumy, and Chernigov regions remained fully or partially without electricity due to adverse weather, and another 503 communities across Ukraine were cut off from power supply for other reasons, Ukrenergo said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian media have reported with reference to the Ukrainian Energy Ministry that, "because of the extreme heat and growing consumption in Europe, imports remained lower than usual."

Ukraine planned to import 23,561 MWh of electricity from Romania, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary on Thursday, with transmission capacity reaching 1,232 MW during certain hours, it said.

As seen from Ukrenergo's daily reports, electricity imports into Ukraine from Europe have declined amid extremely hot weather since July 12.

Yury Boiko, an advisor to the Ukrainian prime minister and member of Ukrenergo's supervisory board, suggested that the situation in the national power grid, which has become complicated due to the extreme heat in the past two weeks, would begin to improve as air temperature declines, and the outage schedules could be eased starting Saturday.  

"We'll be living according to [outage] schedules anyway, but they'll be considerably milder that they've been lately, especially in the past two weeks," Ukrainian media quoted Boiko as saying during a panel discussion at the Media Center in Kiev on Thursday.

Power consumption and air temperature correlate with a lag of about three days, which makes it possible to anticipate its decline within the next few days, considering that the heat is going to start subsiding on Thursday, he said.

In the medium term, power supply should be relatively stable in August, September, and possibly October, if weather is not unusually cold, Boiko said.

He said he was optimistic about the next two months as this period should not see abnormally high temperatures, and "the amount of power generating assets in the system should grow higher than those under repairs."            

Alexander Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center (EIR Center), said he did not expect considerable improvements in power supply within the next three to four weeks, while the situation could start changing for the better at the end of August.

"The completion of a nuclear power plant unit's maintenance would mark some slight improvement, but the general picture would change for the better during the last ten days of August," Kharchenko said.

Ukraine might do without power outages in the start and the middle of the fall, Kharchenko said. "Provided luck and good weather, there should be no outages in September and October," he said.