Energy Minister Michael Damianos said on Thursday that everything possible would be done to avoid power cuts overnight, after outages hit consumers the previous evening. Speaking to reporters as he arrived at the headquarters of the semi-governmental Electricity Authority of Cyprus (EAC) for the presentation of its board's annual report, Damianos said a fault at EAC generators appeared to have forced Wednesday night's cuts.
He said the island currently has more than 1,000 megawatts of conventional production capacity and more than 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity, meaning there is no supply problem during daylight hours. The shortfall emerges in the early evening, he said, when temperatures remain high but solar output has already dropped away. Damianos said the only lasting solution is to store solar energy that is currently lost during the day, and confirmed that the Transmission System Operator (TSO) has awarded a tender for 120 megawatts of storage capacity.
"They will be in Cyprus in January 2027, definitely installed before summer 2027," he said, adding that this should prevent the same problems from recurring next summer. He praised EAC staff for minimising the scale of Wednesday's cuts and appealed for patience, acknowledging that residents were being inconvenienced.
Asked whether further cuts were likely, Damianos said he could not predict additional faults at EAC, and that only the TSO, which manages the system, could assess that risk, adding that any disruption would be kept as brief as possible. He said today's high temperatures were expected to ease from Friday.
On why residents are not informed in advance which areas will lose power, Damianos said such notifications should come from EAC itself. He confirmed that private investors have been granted connection terms for up to 150 megawatts of their own storage capacity, on top of EAC's own storage projects, which he said should together ease the problem by next summer. Asked whether the recurrence of the same problem for a second consecutive summer meant anyone should be held responsible, Damianos said he could not say who was accountable, noting that government handles the political dimension of energy adequacy while technical matters rest with the relevant experts.
On ageing infrastructure, Damianos said EAC has ordered new, lower-capacity generators of its own, due in 2028 and 2029, to replace three ageing units at the Dhekelia power station. He said the definitive fix lies in the arrival of natural gas at Vasiliko, which he said is cheaper and less polluting and is planned to come online before 2030, when the EAC's oldest units are due to be retired. "Natural gas, new EAC generators and storage: that is our strategy," he said.
Source: CNA
