“Tavanir is taking a set of measures like peak clipping to increase last year’s target of 4,000 MW to 6,000 MW this year in cooperation with domestic power companies,” Arash Kordi was also quoted as saying by ILNA on Saturday.
Kordi noted that the company plans to further publicize the reduction of power consumption during peak demand hours by industrial subscribers as well as households.
Peak clipping involves reducing system peak loads at set periods by eliminating unproductive energy use, which is a typical form of energy management, according to Financial Tribune.
The official added that to handle peak power demand in the summer, Tavanir aims at overhauling operational power stations, launching new plants and readying its workforce for dealing with any unwanted incident in the electricity network.
Kordi said water stored in Karkheh and Dez dams in Khuzestan Province has decreased so dramatically that the last summer’s hydropower plants’ electricity generation cannot materialize this year.
According to projections, Iran will have about 3,000-3,500 MW of electricity shortage in the current fiscal year, as hydropower plants’ total production is not expected to exceed 6,000 MW.
The plants generated about 9,200 MW of power last year.
“To save the dams’ water for peak power demand in the summer, we reduced the hydropower plants’ production and received the minimum load,” he said.
The Energy Ministry announced on Thursday that 22 provinces have experienced a reduction in precipitation rate compared with the last water year (ended Sept. 22, 2017), IRNA reported.
However, it noted that rainfalls in the past two months have improved the average reduction from 45% to 27%.
Based on the report, the drainage basins of Urmia Lake and Caspian Sea, with a 44.6% and 13.1% rise in precipitation respectively, have experienced much better conditions in the current water year compared to the last year.
A drainage basin is any area of land where precipitation collects and drains off into a common outlet, such as into a river, bay or other body of water.