Ukraine sets up commission to study causes of emergency power outage
MOSCOW. May 31 (Interfax) - Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko has instructed the State Inspectorate for Energy Supervision to set up immediately a commission to study causes of a major emergency outage in the country's unified energy system.
"Power generation completely covers consumption now. Hence, no scheduled outages were planned in any regions," Ukrainian media quoted the Energy Ministry as saying on social media on Tuesday.
Partial outages occurred in Kiev, Kharkov, Poltava, Vinnitsa, and Sumy due to a frequency drop in the unified energy system, it said.
As reported with reference to the national power grid operator Ukrenergo, customers in several regions across Ukraine were cut off from electric power supplies as several high-voltage grid lines experienced an emergency outage at about 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday. Ukrenergo assured customers that power supply would be resumed within a few hours.
It emphasized that the outages had been caused by technical reasons rather than grid capacity shortage.
The DTEK energy holding reported emergency outages across Ukraine on May 30 due to a decrease in frequency of power in the grid, whose reasons Ukrenergo was probing.
The Energy Ministry said in a later update that nearly 2 million customers in 12 regions of Ukraine were cut off from power due to the grid's desynchronization. This had been the largest number of consumers simultaneously cut off from power since February.
The emergency also caused temporary power outages in Moldova, the ministry said.
As of late Tuesday, Ukrenergo resumed power supply, and its dispatch center did not plan any consumption restrictions for the end of the day, Ukrenergo CEO Vladimir Kudritsky said.
"An emergency outage occurred in high-voltage transmission lines after protection systems were activated, and therefore, power supply was cut in a number of regions. We're scrutinizing the causes of the incident that occurred in the power grid," Ukrainian media quoted Kudritsky as saying on social media.
Kudritsky insisted that the outage was not caused by capacity shortage, and its causes would be identified in the course of an inquiry conducted by specialists from the State Inspectorate for Energy Supervision and Ukrenergo.