Ukraine was supplying limited amounts of electricity to Crimea on Saturday but the shortages of power compelled the regional power grids operator to continue rolling outages in different parts of the peninsular republic, Sergei Yegorov, the Crimean minister of fuel and energy told TASS.
“We’re getting 400 MW of electric power from Ukraine now (the maximum inflow reached 650 MW in recent days - TASS),” he said. “The system is operating in the ‘until further notice’ mode.”
Crimean own power plants generate about 400 MW of electricity. Consumption of power at peak hours may reach some 1,000 MW and that is why the regional authorities have to compensate for the shortages by rolling outages across the peninsula, Yegorov said.
On Saturday, three of Crimea’s four thermoelectric power plants were generating electricity at full capacity. “The Simferopol, Kamysh-Burun and Sevastopol thermoelectric plants are working at 100% of their capacity now.”
The thermoelectric plant in Saki, the fourth one in Crimea, had automatic equipment glitches because of the impact of outages and hikes in production loads and it was working with periodical flaws, Yegorov said.
The regional power utility operator was getting a huge amount of complaints over the rolling outages, he admitted. “These outages are our main headache right now and people complain over what they view as social unfairness, as some of them have to stay without power supplies longer than others.”
“We’re doing our best to explain to the customers the areas where the socially significant facilities are located are the only exceptions from the outage plan,” Yegorov said.
Ukraine has fully suspended supplies of electric power to Crimea, a former Ukrainian region that reunited with Russia in March 2014, on two occasions over the past week, with the inflow of electricity dropping to 0 MW.
Crimean President Sergei Aksyonov said in plain language in this connection that the disconnections of Crimea from the Ukrainian power grids would not put the region to its knees
“No one will be able to talk to us in this manner and no one will put us to our knees,” he told reporters in Kerch. “These difficulties are temporary.”
Aksyonov recalled that the necessary power generating facilities would be built in the republic in the format of Russia’s federal program for development of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol.