TEHRAN – Iranian Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian inaugurated five major electricity projects worth 29 trillion rials (about $690.4 million) across the country on Tuesday, to mark the beginning of the third phase of the ministry’s A-B-Iran program.

The inaugurated projects comprised of 8,142 sub-projects including numerous electricity supply projects, as well as power network modification and optimization projects.

The first phase of the A-B-Iran program (the acronyms A and B stand for water and electricity in Persian) was initiated in the Iranian calendar year 1398 (ended on March 19, 2020), during which 220 major projects with a total investment of 335.6 trillion rials (about $7.99 billion) were put into operation across the country.

In the second phase of the program that was carried out in the previous Iranian calendar year (ended on March 20) 250 water and energy projects worth 500 trillion rials (about $11.9 billion) were inaugurated in several provinces.

The third phase of the program was officially started on Tuesday and like the previous phases, this year, too, the Energy Ministry is planning to inaugurate numerous water and electricity projects in various provinces every week.

In the last week of the previous Iranian calendar year (which was the last week of the second phase of the A-B-Iran scheme) Ardakanian had inaugurated several new systems for improving services in the water and electricity sectors.

The mentioned systems were put into operation in various areas including resource consumption improvement, asset utilization, human resource management, financial resources management, and reforming work processes in order to create transparency and to facilitate and accelerate affairs while eliminating possible bottlenecks.

A smart system for improving the Energy Ministry’s support and emergency centers called Homa, as well as a new customer services system called Chavoush were also among the launched systems.

A mechanized network monitoring system called Sanam was also put into operation; this system is aimed at monitoring the electricity networks of various provinces in order to reduce electricity losses and improve the efficiency of the country’s power network.

EF/MA