July 11, 2014
Tehranis were warned last week that unless they cut back on their electricity consumption immediately they face the prospect of blackouts lasting four to five hours a day.
The government acknowledged it had already started cutting the electricity flow to scattered sections of the capital to prevent the entire electrical system from closing down due to excessive demand. It did not say how many times it had done that or how many residents were impacted.
The head of the Tehran Power Distribution Co., Mohammad Hashemi, told the Sharq daily that rising demand for electricity since summer began, mainly for air conditioning, has put the power system under stress.
He said Iran has cut its power exports to neighboring countries in half. Iran has power-sharing agreements with all seven countries with which it shares land borders.
Hashemi said, “High usage due to the heat leads to rising temperatures in the transformer oil, which forces the transformer to shut down in order to cool.”
Tehran often suffered summer blackouts in the 20th Century, but a major power generating expansion made such outages a rarity in the last decade.
Hashemi did not say how the power company would decide which areas of the city would suffer blackouts.
