Iran is continuing to experience blackouts and power outages across the national grid. Demonstrations over the outage in early July shocked the Iranian regime, with protesters in Tehran blaming the regime for the issues while chanting ‘Death to Khamenei’.
The outgoing Minister of Energy Ardakanian of Hassan Rouhani’s government said that the power outage was due to the premature warming of the air and the decrease in rainfall.
Mohammad Hassan Motavilizadeh, CEO of Tavanir, blamed the electricity shortages on a reduction in the volume of water in dam reservoirs which is affecting the production of hydropower. Another excuse, this time from the former Minister of energy, lay the blame on the extraction of cryptocurrency (bitcoin) for wasting electricity.
While cunningly apologizing to the people for the shortage, the mullahs’ now outgoing president Hassan Rouhani at the same time, mockingly stated that “China and America” have electricity problems too.
Figures suggest that the peak power consumption in Iran sits around 55 gigawatts (GW), while electricity generation statistics from the Ministry of Energy reveal that country’s capacity is over 85 GW. According to these numbers, shortages should not exist.
The first lie of the clerical regime is the actual production capacity, which in practice is a maximum of about 60 gigawatts.
Due to erosion and technical defects in the systems at thermal power plants, the generators often only run at partial production capacity, even though the plants supply up to 80% of the country’s electricity.
The mullahs’ second lie is about the consumption increase due to the seasonal heat. According to the outgoing Minister of Energy, the rise in temperature in May was 3 degrees compared to the previous year’s average.
Reports from the CEO of Ahwaz Power Distribution have said that even one degree of an increase in temperature will create an additional 300 megawatts (MW) of extra load during the production peak. By this logic, an increase of three degrees in the temperature would create less than one GW of overload.
The mullahs’ third lie is the high average household consumption. According to global statistics, Iran has an average per capita global consumption (about 3 kWh), which is lower than similar consumption in similar countries.
In a comparison of the annual electricity consumption across all sectors of industry in Iran, the share of household consumption sits at the lowest level, behind all the industry sectors.
The next lie is the outsized role of lack of rainfall. The amount of hydroelectric power generation is between 10 and 12 gigawatts, and the largest figure given by the regime, which is also likely to be exaggerated, is 14.5 gigawatts.
The lack of rain will supposedly cause a 40% drop in electricity production according to the government, but with these figures, the actual amount of deducted power is less than 6 GW, about one-tenth of the total output of electricity of the whole of Iran.
The country’s electricity transmission and distribution network are worn out due to lack of investment, so the rate of energy loss reaches an incredible 12%. In other words, about 10 gigawatts of the country’s electricity production is wasted simply due to the freak network condition.
