Hotline of power engineering specialists:
We asked First Deputy General Director - Chief Engineer of IDGC of Centre Alexander Pilyugin to speak about the elimination of the effects of warming this weekend together with employees of IDGC of Centre and Volga Region, as well as other subsidiaries and affiliates of PJSC "Rosseti" participating in organizing and conducting first responding and restoration operations.
- Alexander, how things are now with the power supply of consumers of the Kaluga region?
- The situation has stabilized. During the last week the Kaluga region took several blows of bad weather. On Friday 11 November icy rains triggered interruptions in 12 districts of the Kaluga region. We consolidated the strength and resources of IDGC of Centre and Volga Region, IDGC of Centre, IDGC of South, FGC UES and contractors. The scale of destruction was severe, so it took a few days for the power companies took to return the light in every house.
Some crews, who came to the aid of the residents of the Kaluga region, were sent to places of permanent deployment. But we left some of them in the Kaluga region in case of their help needed again - before we got a forecast warning for 19 November.
And on the night of 18 to 19 November in the Kaluga region there was sharp warming, leading to disturbances in the power supply. Another front caused a new wave of cuts related to the fact that the snow and frost on the trees began to melt and trees straightening started touching wire, causing a short circuit. But this time the scale of the damage was much less. Basically, the crews had to remove branches from wires, restore wires. 71 crews were involved in the restoration work. By evening all the damaged lines were restored, local outages occurred throughout the day and night. They were quickly eliminated.
- Of course, it is early to give a final assessment. But preliminarily what can be said about the cause of the blackouts?
- There are many reasons, but the main among them is that in the Kaluga region there are unique in probability and extreme-scale weather conditions. So, there was this amount of damage to the grid. We in these days hear criticism in our address. They say that the power engineers do nothing to prevent the failures. But, believe me, if it were so, then the consequences would have been much bigger and longer.
- If we are talking about the criticism, the main reason for it is difference of data that different agencies give. How do you comment?
- And this is just not surprising. Simply each agency has its own scoring system. For example, it refers to the number of people caught in the outage zone. Some consider by registration of citizens, others - by the actual resident population. And there can be especially a big difference with outages in the case of holiday villages and gardeners’ non-commercial partnerships. But in any case, every consumer is important for us and restoration work will not be completed until at least one of them has no light.