A MAJOR power outage left 80 per cent of the country without electricity for five hours yesterday, leaving the police, fire service and electricity authority (EAC) scrambling to deal with the knock-on effects of the blackout.
The near shutdown of power generating units at Dhekelia in the early hours of the morning resulted in a limited supply of electricity on the grid from 4.45am until around 10am, highlighting the island’s fragile reliance on secondary units since the destruction of the Vassilikos power plant last July.
Police spokesman Andreas Angelides said police responded immediately to the blackout, sending traffic police to replace the non-operational traffic lights at main intersections across the island.
According to police, four minor road accidents occurred during the power outage, though no serious injuries were recorded.
The fire service was called out 24 times island-wide, mainly between 6am and 8.30am, to free people stuck in elevators while on their way to work.
In one instance in a home in Anthoupoli, a fire broke out when residents lit candles as a result of the blackout, causing serious damage to the building.
EAC spokesman Costas Gavrielides told the Cyprus Mail that the problem started at 4.39am, when the grid’s circuit breakers automatically cut the EAC’s connection to the electricity system in the north following a fault in the north’s system.
The EAC is interconnected with the north’s system at two points. Following the Mari explosion which wiped out the island’s main power plant, the authority arranged through a third party to purchase electricity from the north. It also brought mobile generators from the US, Greece and Israel and began reconstruction of two of the main units at Vassilikos.
On March 22, parliament ‘crossed’ the budget for the purchase of electricity from third parties, effectively putting an end to the supplementary supply of electricity from the north.
However, the two systems remained interconnected, allowing the EAC to channel to the north when necessary any “undesirable reactive power” which creates instability in the system.
Gavrielides explained that reactive power is not purchased but comes as a by-product of real power when using long, underground transmission cables, a bit like the foam on beer, and has to be absorbed somehow.
When the north experienced problems yesterday, the EAC’s circuit breakers “correctly shut down the interconnection to isolate us from their problems, but at the same time we lost the ability to pass on our reactive power”, said Gavrielides.
“This didn’t help us though since when there is interconnection, the occupied areas can absorb the undesirable reactive power,” he said, adding: “Within a single fraction of a second, we were stuck with reactive power which couldn’t be absorbed by our machines, resulting in one unit after another at Dhekelia automatically switching off, apart from one”.
For the next few hours, one unit out of six at Dhekelia plus another unit at Moni were the only operational units supplying power to the grid.
Normal power supply did not return until after 10am yesterday. Head of the Dhekelia plant Andreas Polydorides said the units needed a few hours to become operational again after being shut down by the automatic safety mechanism.
Before the Mari blast, the large units at the Vassilikos power plant had greater ability to absorb reactive power, said Gavrielides. The smaller mobile units brought to Vassilikos since do not have the same capability, he added.
The EAC spokesman noted that current absorption capabilities increase when the EAC is connected to the north’s grid.
EAC chairman Haris Thrasou said until Units Four and Five are operational again at Vassilikos and as long as the EAC has to rely on the smaller mobile units, “this instability will continue”.
EAC technicians were working night and day to prepare Unit Five for the peak summer period, he said. Both units are expected to be fully operational by the autumn.
Thrasou noted that interconnection with the north helped to reduce instability in the system.
Commerce Minister Neoclis Sylikiotis said yesterday no one could have foreseen the “technical problems” created. He said he was assured by the relevant authorities that the problem will not arise when demand is high, referring to the peak summer period when Cyprus takes over the EU Presidency.
The Transmissions System Operator, Energy Regulator and EAC were in meetings yesterday to examine the technical issues raised by the power outage.
EVROKO spokesman Michalis Georgallas yesterday called on the EAC to end the risks created by its interconnection with the north’s power system.
Responding, Gavrielides said the authority would not get involved in the political aspects of the issue.
“But on the engineering aspects, we do have a say and there is an advantage to interconnecting the two systems. It gives us security of supply, and ability to purchase power,” he said.
Asked whether the same set of circumstances could happen again as long as the main units at Vassilikos are not operational, Gavrielides said: “I can’t rule it out, but it could even have happened before Mari though the chances were lower.”
