In the second half of May, the production dropped 12.5 percent bellow planned. – The consumption in this period remained at the level of two percent bellow planned by Electric Power portfolio.
May 2014 will be remembered as a synonym for terrible floods which hit Serbia leaving the damage that is yet to be estimated. Production of electricity and sale to final customers have special aspect in analyzing the damage to electric power industry, if we look at it separately from the damage to OPMs of Kolubara, damage due to operation breakdown of TPPNT A and TPP “Kolubara”, as well as due to significant decrease in production of HPP “Đerdap” in order to protect the riparian area of the Danube. Right in the middle of the month, the electric energy situation in Serbia got dramatically different characteristics when the production in EPS’ plants and sale to final customers are taken into account.
In the first half of May, the electricity production was over the level of planned 8.6 percent, and in the second half it dropped 12.5 percent bellow the values planned by Electric Power portfolio. Because of that a certain amount of kWh had to be bought in the market. The sale to the final customers did not have such a dramatic discrepancy: in the first half of May it was three percent higher than planned by Electric Power portfolio, and in the second half it was two percent lower. In addition, the first half of month was two degrees colder than average in May, and the second half was half a degree warmer than average temperature for those days.
In the EPS Electricity Trade Department they say that the second half of May was marked by colder weather, with the average daily temperature on days between 14th and 17th May of 10 degrees Celsius, which caused a huge rise in electricity consumption, from previous values of some 80 million a day to 90 million kWh on 15th May, for example.
– As of 18th May, the outside temperature rose to more than 20 degrees, so the electricity consumption dropped to some 75 million kWh per day. On Sunday, 25th May, the consumption was less than 70 million kWh. Thanks to that, the electricity sale (full supply) from 15th to 31st of May amounted to total 1.3 billion kWh, which is two percent lower than planned by in the Electric Power portfolio – says Jovica Vranić, the Director of Energy Planning and Management in the EPS Electricity Trade Department.
Explaining that the production of coal fired thermal power plants in the first half of the month would have been practically at the planned level if it weren’t for substation failure in TPP “Kostolac B”, Vranić said that in the second half of this month the production in thermal sector dropped to 32.7 percent bellow the planned value from Electric Power portfolio. The reasons for that are the floods which paralyzed Kolubara mines, coal transport and thermal capacities flooding them directly or threatening to flood them.
In the second half of May the fluctuations happened in the production of run-of-the-river hydro power plants. Unlike the first half of the month when these HPPs produced 22 percent more energy than it was planned, in the second half of the month their production was 5.4 percent less than planned for that time of year and the inflows were enormously high. Due to extremely high inflow to the Danube which was higher than 12,000 cubic meters per second in the last decade of May which was two times the quantity envisaged by Electric Power portfolio, the both of Đerdap HPPs operated with alleviated strength, up to 500 MW less. According to Vranić, the situation got better at the end of the month, when the inflow in the Danube decreased to less than ten thousand cubic meters per second.
At the Drina watershed, at HPP “Bајinа Bаštа“ the average daily inflow was some 660 cubic meters per second, and then in the middle of the month it reached 1,400 cubic meters per second. At the same time, at HPP “Zvornik” the Drina was bringing some 2,700 cubic meters per second, which is, as Vranić explains, the situation when the interflow to HPP “Zvornik” was practically equal to the inflow to HPP “Bajina Bašta”.
– Because of such hydrology, in the second half of May, the run-of-the-river HPPs in the Drina watershed produced some 60 million kWh more, while HPP “Đerdap 1” and “Đerdap 2“ produced 90 million kWh less than planned by Electric Power portfolio – Vranić said.
Reservoir hydro power plants topped the plans in the first as well as the second half of May, and after the 15th May they gave the system 120 million kWh more than planned. That is some 322 percent above the planned quantities.
