Scheduled stabilizing outages to be applied in Kiev, Odessa, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk regions starting Monday - DTEK

MOSCOW. Dec 5 (Interfax) - DTEK, Ukraine's major power supply holding, has announced the return to scheduled power outages in the Kiev, Odessa, Donetsk, and Dnepropetrovsk regions starting Monday, December 5.

"We are returning to stabilizing outage schedules starting December 5" in the Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, and Odessa regions, Ukrainian media quoted DTEK as saying on a social account early on Monday.

DTEK warned, however, that the situation in the power supply system remains complicated and unstable. "Therefore, we ask for treating possible deviations that may be necessary to balance the Ukrainian power system with understanding," it said.

Sergei Kovalenko, head of the YASNO power supply company, said Ukraine is neither importing nor exporting electricity now.

"The entsoe.eu website has a dashboard with the Scheduled Commercial Exchanges tab showing commercial exports. It does not indicate any imports or exports for Ukraine. There is also the Cross-Border Physical Flow tab, which shows the system's balancing results," Ukrainian media quoted Kovalenko as saying on his social account in the early hours of Monday.

Kovalenko illustrated his post with screenshots from the ENTSO-E website showing that Ukraine exchanged some electricity with Romania and Slovakia on December 3.

The Ukrainian power system, which continues to operate synchronously with the European one, is receiving certain amounts of electricity from power systems of European countries and exporting the same amounts to those systems to balance them, he said.

"For instance, Slovakia gave Ukraine 282 MW from midnight to 1:00 a.m. yesterday. And [Ukraine] gave Romania 201 MW. There is also Moldova, which gives us [electricity] that we transmit to someone else, as part of the European system. That is, there're no commercial exports, Ukraine is not selling electricity to ENTSO-E," Kovalenko said.

A trend toward reducing power shortage is continuing, Kovalenko said. "Kiev usually consumes less on weekends than on workdays, and maximum consumption today was 1,089 MW. The shortage was insignificant, about 170 MW," he said.

The Energy Ministry has banned commercial exports of electricity since October 11, after the Ukrainian power supply infrastructure sustained major damage.