Ukrenergo records growing electricity consumption in Ukraine

MOSCOW. July 9 (Interfax) - Electricity consumption in Ukraine has grown considerably with the start of a new working week and increasing outdoor temperature, Ukrainian media reported with reference to the national power grid operator Ukrenergo on Tuesday.

"With the start of a working week and rising air temperature, the peak of electricity consumption on Monday, July 8, was 10% higher than the same indicator on Sunday, July 7," Ukrenergo said.

As reported, regional power operators are applying electricity consumption restrictions for the entire day on July 9.

On Tuesday morning until 2:00 p.m., Ukrenergo applied hour-by-hour outage schedules to two categories of consumers, and as the heat strengthened, it planned to extend them to three or four categories, it said.

To compensate for electricity shortage in the grid, the Ukrenergo dispatch center decides how many categories of consumers should be cut off from power in all regions simultaneously, while the regional power operators in each region decide how long these outages should continue and which categories of consumers be cut off from power within a particular time slot.

Apart from the fact that the Ukrainian power system has lost 9 GW of its generating capacity, growing consumption prompted by the heat also adds to the shortage in the system, it said.

As of Tuesday morning, 504 communities across Ukraine had no electricity, Ukrenergo said. A number of consumers in the Dnepropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankovsk, Rovno, Kharkov, and some other regions were cut off from power for technical reasons.

On July 9, Ukraine plans to import a total of 29,238 MWh of electricity from Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Moldova, its transmission capacity reaching 1,539 MW during certain hours, Ukrenergo said.