TEHRAN – Daily electricity consumption in Iran reached 66,250 megawatts (66.25 gigawatts) on Monday to register a new record in the history of Iran’s electricity industry as a new heatwave has blanketed the country over the past few days, IRNA reported.
According to the Iranian Energy Ministry’s Spokesman for Electricity Industry Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, the mentioned figure was 8,000 MW more than the consumption in the previous year’s peak period, and 10,000 MW more than the figure in the previous year’s same date.
The country’s power plants are currently able to generate only 54,000 MW of electricity which is nearly 12,000 MW less than the power demand, Rajabi Mashahadi said.
The official further noted that each degree of temperature rise would boost the country’s electricity consumption by 1,500 MW and the temperature is expected to increase even more in the coming days.
He underlined the increasing use of air conditioning devices in the summer period as one of the major reasons for the increase in the country’s electricity consumption, calling on people to manage their consumption and use the automatically regulated devices to decrease energy waste.
He also announced that the Energy Ministry is planning to import 650 MW more electricity in the coming days to offset the surge in demand.
Iranian Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian on Tuesday attended an emergency meeting of the country’s electricity management headquarters along with other senior officials from the Energy Ministry to discuss the issue and explore ways for alleviating the situation.
In the past decade, constant temperature rising and the significant decrease of rainfalls across Iran have put the country in a hard situation regarding electricity supply during peak consumption periods.
This year, however, new deteriorating factors like severe drought and the decline in the country’s water resources as well as a new wave of illegal cryptocurrency mining across the country have also worsened the situation.
Iranians are currently left in the dark for several hours each day based on a pre-planned outage program implemented by the Energy Ministry.
Iran’s Power Generation, Distribution, and Transmission Company (known as Tavanir) has previously announced that the company is implementing over 40 different programs for managing the situation and to prevent blackouts in the country, however, so far these programs do not seem to be working as expected.