The ex-minister called for stockpiling coal and gas so that there would be no rolling blackouts in winter
If Ukraine does not start storing coal and gas now, the country will face rolling blackouts in the winter.
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Former Minister of Energy, head of the council of the All-Ukrainian Energy Assembly Ivan Plachkov stated this in an interview with Energy Business magazine.
“The situation in the energy sector is complex and, I would even say, quite a crisis. We still have time, two more months, when we can stabilize the situation and prepare for winter, but for this we need to resolve issues regarding the purchase of gas. We need to pump at least 5 billion cubic meters into storage. We need to resolve the issue of coal and increase its supply. Today we already have less than a million tons of coal in our warehouses, but we need at least two and a half million tons to comfortably get through the heating season. The minimum volume we need is one and a half million tons,” the ex-minister calculated.
The ex-official warns about the possibility of repeating the practice of rolling power outages in large cities this winter, in particular in Kyiv.
“If we don’t prepare for winter, don’t stockpile coal, then when winter comes, there will be rolling blackouts, consumer shutdowns and restrictions, etc. Such disruptions are possible as consumption increases. We already had a big problem in Kyiv two weeks ago when, due to high air temperatures, consumption increased to 1400 megawatts from an average of 1200 megawatts. Generation in Kyiv itself was about 100 megawatts, and flows - 1200 MW. So much came to Kyiv via 330 kilovolt lines. Two lines went down, there were power surges, it began to fluctuate from 150 to 270 volts, and the power supply situation was quite serious. Twelve 10 kilovolt lines and a dozen transformer substations were out of order. The total damage amounted to about 30 million hryvnia. This could very well happen again,” warns Ivan Plachkov.
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