Tehran Power Outages Hampering Industries

EghtesadOnline: Frequent power outages in Tehran have adversely affected industrial units, taking a toll on electrical equipment and reducing efficiency.

News ID: ۷۸۳۳۳۲

18 July 2018

According to IRNA, the Energy Ministry has announced the daily timetable of blackouts in the metropolis since past two weeks, as the province suffers a water shortage unprecedented in the past few decades, which has significantly reduced hydropower generation.

The Energy Ministry’s projections show hydropower plants’ electricity output will not exceed 6,000 megawatts this summer while the figure stood at 9,300 MW last summer.

However, industrialists say unplanned outages have led to disruption and decline in production, in addition to damaging expensive machinery, Financial Tribune reported.

Mohammad Amin Emami, Tehran governor general’s deputy for economic affairs, said blackouts will cause no serious damage in case the industrial units take precautionary measures, one of which is installing power generators.

A manufacturer at Abbasabad Industrial Town, 50 km southeast of Tehran, noted that the units are not equipped with electricity generators because it is too costly to install devices capable of supplying sufficient power.

“Most high-tech tools in factories, like furnaces, use more than 1 MW of electricity and even an emergency generator cannot produce this amount of power,” Seyyed Sajjad Hashemi, the industrial town’s head of the board of directors, said.

Emami stressed that unplanned power cuts have taken place due to the dilapidated network, which may take a long time to renovate and not because of power shortage.

Alireza Kolahi, a member of Iran Electricity Industry Syndicate, told Mehr News Agency last week that a part of Tehran’s power grid went on stream in 1973 when the city’s population stood at 4 million.

According to the official, the Energy Ministry has made major investments in electricity infrastructure, but it has been oblivious to renovating the age-old distribution grid.

Mahmoud Reza Haqifam, a deputy at Iran Power Generation, Distribution and Transmission Company, had earlier said unpredictable incidents in power generation and distribution networks cause the occasional unplanned blackouts.

“About 90% of the blackouts across the country have been made based on the timetables,” he added.