Hotline of power engineering specialists:
15 November a meeting was held in Kaluga between Region Governor Anatoly Artamonov and General Director IDGC of Centre Oleg Isaev, who is also Acting General Director of IDGC of Centre and Volga Region. These large distribution grid companies provide electricity to 20 regions of Central Russia.
The main topic of the conversation was the organization of work on liquidation of consequences of "freezing rain" in a number of districts of the region.
Assessing the situation, Oleg Isaev called it an unprecedented scale damage to the electric grid of the region. According to him, it was only possible to deal with it through coordinated work of power engineers of several companies, as well as the full support of the regional administration. "179 crews of 934 people and 287 vehicles worked at the damaged lines. It is very important that the regional authorities assisted the power engineers, since the people have to work around the clock," stressed the head of the power grid companies.
Anatoly Artamonov, in turn, highly appreciated the quality of the work of specialists, who eliminated blackouts caused by the "freezing rain". He noted that the current situation showed not only where there are problems, but also became a good lesson, from which the right conclusions are to be made. "The trouble came not only to our region, but also other areas. And in technical terms, decisions must be made that in the future they would insure us from such situations. In particular, it is necessary to keep in stock a much larger number of redundant power supply sources. This allows to quickly connect low voltage substations. In addition, it is necessary to change the technical standards for electric systems construction. The weather has proven that the existing requirements do not take into account the realities of our weather," said Governor.
He paid special tribute to all the staff of energy services involved in the elimination of consequences of the "freezing rain", noting that due to their actions we managed to avoid major disruptions in water supply and electricity supply to social facilities. At present time, the power engineers are eliminating local outages at the request of customers, and also transferring electricity supply from independent power supply sources to the main circuit. This work is being carried out as quickly as possible.