Press releases

Regarding the causes of power outages in the southern regions of Kazakhstan on 25 January 2022 and the situation with electricity supply to consumers

On 25 January 2022 at 11:59, Nur-Sultan time, in the Republic of Uzbekistan due to short circuit, 6 units at Syrdarinskaya thermal power plant shut down with the total loss of generation more than 1500 MW. The resulting power shortage in the Uzbek power system led to an unauthorised consumption of power from the Kazakh power system, which is connected in parallel operation with the Uzbek and Kyrgyz power systems. This resulted in a power surge in 500 kV lines of Kazakhstan North-East-South power transmission system and their subsequent overload.

To prevent damage to the energy equipment and complete blackout of the southern regions of the country, the emergency control system disconnected the transmission lines and islanded the power supply in Almaty, Zhambyl, Turkestan and Kyzylorda regions.

Thanks to the correct and timely operation of KEGOC emergency control system, all power plants in the southern regions of the country remained in operation and continued supply power and heat to consumers with total capacity of about 1500 MW. Thus, a complete blackout of consumers in the southern zone of Kazakhstan was prevented. However, to the shortage of transmission capacity in 500 kV Kazakhstan North-East-South power transmission system, resulted in a deliberate load shedding of about 1,800 MW.

Meanwhile, the power systems of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan were in complete blackout, with all power plants and consumers disconnected. The load shedding was about 9600 MW (100% of consumption) in the Uzbek power system, and about 2600 MW (100% of consumption) in Kyrgyzstan.

In the course of emergency restoration of the grid normal operation, already at 14:45 all consumers in Kyzylorda oblast were reconnected, and at 14:53 the same happened in the city of Almaty and in Almaty oblast. By 16:00 the power supply to consumers in the southern regions of Kazakhstan had been restored.

As part of the restoration efforts, the UPS of Kazakhstan provided assistance to the power systems of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan by supplying power to black start the power plants of these countries and begin restoration. It took approximately one day for the Kyrgyz power system to return to normal operation. As of 14:00, January 27, the power system of Uzbekistan has been continuing the emergency restoration.

It should be noted that this emergency has not been attributed to digital mining consumers.

With regard to constrained electricity supply to digital mining consumers, KEGOC informs that the Unified Power System of Kazakhstan (Kazakhstan UPS) is still experiencing power shortage, mainly due to high rate of faults at power plants and the significant growth of electricity consumption, which exceeded 6% last year, which is 3 times higher than in recent years: 2% in 2020 and 1.9% in 2019.

Given this power shortage situation, in order to ensure uninterrupted power supply to the households and the country's economy, KEGOC, together with the power plants and power supplying organisations, in accordance with the requirements of the applicable laws and regulations of the Republic of Kazakhstan, constrained the power supply to the mining data centres.

FOR REFERENCE:

At present, the Kazakhstan UPS operates in parallel in the energy union of CIS countries and other countries connected by inter-system power lines and single technological operation mode. This cooperation brings enormous economic benefits to each of the participating countries.

The parallel operation facilitates surplus electricity trade with the neighbouring countries, which brings economic benefits to all systems. The parallel operation reduces the cost of construction and maintenance of network infrastructure and generation reserves, as it enables the power systems operating in parallel to partially cover the transmission and reserve generation capacity requirements at the expense of their neighbours.

There are also associated water supply issues in the southern regions of the country.

KEGOC JSC


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