Ukrenergo scales down power consumption limitations in Ukraine on Friday

MOSCOW. July 19 (Interfax) - Regional power operators in Ukraine will cut power supply simultaneously to two or three categories of consumers on Friday, Ukrainian media reported with reference to the national power grid operator Ukrenergo's post on its social account.

Power supply will be cut to two categories of consumers from 0:01 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and from 11:00 p.m. to midnight, and to three categories from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Ukrenergo said, adding that it had no plans of limiting power consumption simultaneously to four categories, as has been the case lately, especially during evening consumption peaks.

It was reported previously that, as equipment went out of order at two power infrastructure facilities on Thursday, power supply was to 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.

In other parts of Ukraine, two categories of consumers were previously warned of outages from 0:01 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. three categories from 5:00 to 4:00 p.m. and from 10:00 p.m. to midnight, and four categories during the evening peak from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Yury Boiko, an advisor to the Ukrainian prime minister and a member of Ukrenergo's supervisory board, said on July 18 that the situation in the national power grid, which had been extremely tense because of the unusually hot weather in the previous two weeks, should start improving as average daily air temperature declined, and the outage schedules were likely to be eased starting Saturday.

"Power consumption should begin gradually declining as temperature lowers today and tomorrow, then there'll be a weekend, when it's typically lower as it is. Starting Monday, this trend toward declining consumption will strengthen in response to the lowering temperature. We'll still have to live according to [outage] schedules, but they'll be considerably milder than they have been, especially in the past two weeks," Boiko said during a panel discussion at the Ukraine Media Center in Kiev on Thursday.