June 25, 2021
With the arrival of hot weather and rising power consumption, sporadic power cuts have started all around the country to the consternation of the public, which thought those days were largely over.
Normally when this happens, countries institute rolling blackouts so that no one is without power for long periods while everyone suffers an absence of power for a few hours at a time. Published tables let people know when the power will be out.
Iran does have rolling blackouts but they frequently don’t adhere to the published timetable.
The result is chaos. Traffic lights suddenly go dark without warning. Elevators suddenly stop between floors. Bodies in morgue refrigerators begin to deteriorate. At Chitgar Park in north Tehran, people on amusement rides like Ferris wheels found themselves stranded high in the sky. Major hospitals have emergency generators, but without advance word they go without power for minutes before they can start their generators. This leaves surgeons working with cellphone flashlights and coronavirus patients on ventilators gasping for air.
In one of the odder impacts, two of Iran’s champion chess players, competing in an Asian championship online, lost their matches when the power went off and they were cut off from their games. State TV said the players got back into the game the next day with backup generators nearby.
The problem erupted nationwide in mid-May when above average temperatures prompted above average use of power for air conditioning. On May 24, every single major daily in Tehran gave the power interruptions top-of-page-one billing. On the first day of major blackouts in Tehran, people in some neighborhoods reported being without power for six hours. The point of a rolling blackout is that no one should be without power for that long.
The Iran Power Generation, Distribution and Transmission Company (Tavanir) has blamed excessive use by the public, but mainly scapegoated crypto-currency miners, who gobble up power, and the lack of rain, which means hydroelectric dams cannot generate as much power as they are designed for.
Many critics say that is all true, but the main culprit is the failure of the Energy Ministry to invest in more generating plants because the government isn’t giving it the funds needed to do so.
The Iranian public uses an unusual amount of electricity because power is dirt cheap and because it is hot.
Cryptocurrency miners are drawn to Iran also because the electricity is so cheap in fact, nearly free when they bribe mosques, who do not pay for power, to allow them to plug into their electricity lines. But the government has forbidden all cryptocurrency mining for four months over the summer, so that should no longer be a problem. Specialists say the total demand for power from crypto-currency miners is not really very high, but the miners are just handy scapegoats. The head of the Majlis committee that overseas the digital economy said cryptocurrency mining consumes only about 1 percent of Iran’s power.
In mid-June, in an effort to stem the problem, Tavanir announced it had started importing power from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. It didn’t say how much additional power that made available.
Iran has a published capacity of 86,000 megawatts. But Iran cannot actually supply that much power. To begin with, some plants are always down for maintenance. But more significantly, the country’s aging infrastructure leaks power so that less than 60,000 MW are ever available, according to people with knowledge of the system.
On June 21, the Energy Ministry said the Bushehr nuclear power plant had been shut down for an “emergency” that it did not elaborate on. That removed about 1,000 megawatts from the power grid and reduced supply by roughly another 2 percent.
Tavanir has routinely warned homes and offices to rethink their high consumption. It said, “Over 5,000 megawatts have been added to installed power capacity since 2019. This apparently is not enough to make up for the ever-increasing consumption in summer.”
Changing work hours in past years helped with load management in provincial capitals, big cities and towns.
The Energy Ministry’s projections show output from hydropower plants will not exceed 3,000 megawatts this summer due to low precipitation. Production from these plants was 8,000 MW last summer, it said.
