Following yesterday’s island-wide blackout, a new technical problem arose early this morning. “We had

another outage in the occupied areas, in ‘Area B’ as we call it. There was a loss of power generation. As a result, the automatic load shedding system kicked in, reducing the load by approximately 20 MB. This affected one of the 14–15 stages we maintain. The outage lasted about 18 minutes. All the units that had been tripped were restored. From 6:06 a.m. until approximately 6:10 a.m., the outage lasted about 18 minutes.”
Haris Zavallis – Assistant Director of the Transmission System Operator

The outage that occurred in the occupied areas affected the free areas, since the two grids are connected at two points as part of the Confidence-Building Measures.

On the other hand, yesterday’s incident involved a problem in the telecommunications network, specifically in the telecommunications link between the large photovoltaic parks, through which data is transmitted to the EAC’s Distribution Control Center

.”Following the announcement by the electricity authority and an update from the distribution operator, they are considering setting up backup circuits through the telecommunications provider to prevent this from happening again. It will take some time to set up the backup circuits. We will identify other measures we can take to prevent a recurrence.”
Haris Zavallis – Assistant Director of the Transmission System Operator

However, nothing rules out the possibility of another island-wide blackout in the coming days.

The Assistant Director of the Transmission System Operator explains that the batteries, once they arrive and are installed on the island, can enhance the system’s security for such situations, which do not involve power shortages

.” “In the event of an instantaneous loss of power, conventional units cannot handle such a high load. However, batteries—or battery systems—can handle it, provided they are programmed to provide the reserve capacity, and the amount of that reserve will be determined by the operator.  Because the loss of generation might not have been 160—it could have been 200, or it could have been 300. Whatever you keep in reserve comes at a cost. We will decide the level of the reserve. The situation will certainly improve with the storage systems.”
Haris Zavallis – Assistant Director of the Transmission System Operator

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risk at “red” alert level The batteries, as the government announced earlier this year, will have a capacity of 120 megawatts. Consequently, reserve capacity will be limited in such an event; however, Haris Zavallis clarified that, in cooperation with private storage systems, the grid operator will be able to address such disruptions without consumers experiencinginterruptions.

Watch the report by Kleio Vourkou: