Barqi Tojik (Tajikistan’s national integrated power company) does not yet hurry to announce the cause of an electricity blackout that hit the country on December 28, 2016.
Meanwhile, a special commission that has been set up by Barqi Tojik to investigate the incident and to determine the reasons for the blackouts has completed the probe and submitted the probe conclusions for consideration to Barqi Tojik.
“Currently, the conclusions are being studied by relevant ministries and agencies and they can be published only after the final coordination,” an official source at Barqi Tojik told Asia-Plus in an interview.
Recall, nearly all of Tajikistan was hit by a blackout on October 28, following an unexpected outage at its largest power producer, the Nurek hydroelectric power plant (HPP).
The blackout affected the capital city Dushanbe and all other areas of the country except for the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which receives electricity from another supplier, Pamir Energy Company (PamirEnergy).
The power went off at about 18:30 local time and came back on three hours later.
The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. On October 31, Barqi Tojik said it had established a special commission to investigate the incident and to determine the reasons for the blackouts.
Nozirjon Yodgori, a spokesman for the utility, told Asia-Plus in an interview that Barqi Tojik would need at least two weeks to complete the probe.
Power shortages are relatively common in Tajikistan. The October 28 blackout was notable, though, because it nearly led to the shutdown of one of the country’s most important industrial facilities – the smelter operated by the Tajik Aluminum Company (TALCO) in Tursunzoda.
Igor Sattarov, a spokesman for TALCO, said on October 31 that Barqi Tojik had tried and failed to restore electricity deliveries to the smelter at 20:40 on October 28. “Power supply was resumed only at 21:30, but Barqi Tojik needed another one and a half hours to resume normal power supply to the smelter,” he told Asia-Plus in an interview. The utility brought delivery volumes back to the regular level at 23:18, he explained.
The blackout occurred just one day before Barqi Tojik began construction work on the dam that will power the Roghun HPP.
Russia’s Sputnik news agency speculated that Tajik authorities might have initiated the outage in a bid to reduce the risk of blasting work at the construction site on the Vakhsh River. Alternatively, Sputnik said, the outage may have resulted from problems with the 500kv transmission line, which supplies power to most regions of Tajikistan.
Meanwhile, some local experts attribute the electricity blackout that hit the country on October 28 to negligence of power engineering specialists.
They say the accident was predictable because power engineering specialists do not observe the rules of operation of hydraulic facilities.
One expert, speaking on the basis of anonymity, said, “Tajikistan adopted the law on safety of hydropower facilities and a number of other standard acts regulating the rules of operation of hydraulic facilities in 2010. However, not all relevant agencies observe them.”
