Kiev receiving about 60% of necessary amount of electricity - power supply company
MOSCOW. Jan 12 (Interfax) - Kiev is currently receiving about 60% of the necessary amount of electricity, about 40% of which it is using to feed critical infrastructure, while the rest the DTEK Kiev Grids power distribution operator is sharing among the other customers, Sergei Kovalenko, head of the YASNO power supply company, said on a social account, as reported by Ukrainian media.
"Firstly, generation has long been falling short of the demand for electricity. Weather is prompting us to use electric appliances more, we switch on heaters. This overloads the system and increases the shortage," Kovalenko said.
Another factor behind power shortage is scheduled maintenance of generating facilities to maintain their functionality, he said.
Engineers are currently trying to compensate for power generation shortage using hydropower plants, which explains why outages have happened at nighttime lately, Kovalenko said.
"As hydropower plants have exhaustible resources and cannot work 24/7, the HPPs accumulate [water] exactly during night hours," he said.
As reported earlier, Ukraine has been limiting power consumption in all regions round-the-clock over the past two days in a row. In a number of regions, including Kiev, Odessa, and Lvov, operators have guaranteed power supply for six to eight hours a day, the rest of the time depending on a particular situation.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Kudritsky, head of the national power grid operator Ukrenergo, said he expected power outages would occur more rarely as weather should become warmer by the weekend, which should reduce power consumption.
"We are expecting warmer weather by the weekend, and it should make it easier for us to fit consumption within the volume of generation that we have," Ukrainian media quoted Kudritsky as saying on the national TV marathon on Wednesday.
Power engineers are doing as much as they can to connect the maximum possible generating capacity to the grid, he said.
In commenting on possible electricity imports, Kudritsky said he expects the implementation of the government's directive under which industrial customers importing electricity will not be cut off from power supply.
"The government recently issued a directive that should encourage Ukrainian customers, primarily industrial ones, to import electricity for their own purposes so as to leave more resources in the power system available to other customers. I hope this mechanism will also start working soon and help increase the volume of electricity we would have at our disposal in the system," he said.