More and more areas in Bishkek have been subjected to scheduled power cuts since December 20. Severelectro explains this fact as being due to the large consumption of electricity by residents of the city, leading to an overloading of existing infrastructure.
According to the press service of Severelectro, the leading electricity company in Kyrgyzstan, blackouts are associated with congestion in 14 separate high-voltage substations. These substations have been overwhelmed by the “sheer force” of electricity consumption, Severelectro say.
“The equipment cannot withstand overloads, because they are not designed for such loading,” an employee of the company, who did not give his name, told Kloop.kg
In turn, excessive consumption may be due to the current sub-zero temperatures, which arrived in Bishkek in mid-December and are expected to lift after December 25.
The state-owned distributor said it was trying to control the energy consumption of inhabitants in the capital. Severelectro note that the most intensive use of electricity occurs between 8 am and 10 am before people go to work, but that consumption is consistently high from 7 am to 11 pm.
“[There is a danger] if the transformer overheats, so for this purpose, we have customers in congested areas disabled for a couple of hours. This will continue until the overload stops,” added the press service of Severelectro.
But, according to a correspondent of Kloop living in the 12th micro-district of Bishkek, there was no electricity in his apartment for four hours on the evening of December 21.
Members of Kyrgyzstan’s most popular web forum, Diesel, reported that during the evening of December 21, there were outages in several areas of the city.
Forum user vladushko reported that the light in his appartment in the center of the city had been off for six hours, without specifying which particular area of Bishkek he was talking about.
Another user complained that at the State Institute of Agriculture, electricity had been periodically cut off.
“Yesterday, the whole day we were without cold water, because the uptake has been disabled. Today, the electricity was turned off three times…the gas boiler is also de-energizing and the pumps do not work,” complained the user.
Members of the forum compared the current outages with those experienced in the winter of 2008-2009 in Bishkek. Back then electricity was periodically disconnected, and power outages ran to a published schedule.
The official explanation for the outages was a lack of water in the Toktogul reservoir, responsible for 40 percent of the country’s electricity.
The new government that came in as a result of the overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April 2010, promised that there would be no problems with electricity in Kyrgyzstan.
Photo: Bektur Iskender
Author: Aida Ishmuhamedova