TEHRAN - Iranian energy experts and scholars believe that increasing the country’s renewable power capacity is the cheapest and fastest way to supply electricity needs in the future, IRNA reported.

“Since construction of new thermal power plants is considerably costly and time consuming, boosting renewable capacity is the only possible solution to compensate for the power shortage in the next summer,” they say.

The power problem

The unbalanced electricity supply and demand during the hot seasons has made the government and the ministry of energy, in particular, to adopt various strategies in order to manage supply and demand and overcome the power shortage across the country.

Imposing daily power outages in the major cities has been one of the main approaches that is used in order to decrease the pressure on the power grids during the peak hours. Although this solution has been almost effective in reducing the peak electricity consumption, but the outages are also costing the country’s economy millions of dollars each day and this cannot be considered a permanent solution for Iran’s power problems.

A discussion panel to discuss solutions

In this regard, and in order to explore ways of handling this challenge, a panel discussion entitled "solutions for reducing power outages in peak consumption hours 1398" was held in Tehran in which several energy experts and scholars including Javad Noferesty, university professor and energy economics expert, Mehrdad Davarifar, consultant to the managing director of Iran's Renewable Energy Agency, Seyed Mohammad-Javad Mousavi, member of the board of directors of the Iranian Renewable Energy Association, and Matin Rezaiyan, as the representative of the private sector in the field of solar energy, discussed the solutions for the country’s power problems during the hot seasons.

The solutions

According to Noferesty, constructing thermal power plants to compensate the gap between electricity supply and demand will take at least two or three years to achieve, so planning on building new thermal plants won’t help mitigating the issue for the next two summers.

Another solution that was proposed in this seminar, was “increasing the prices for overusing costumers”, in this scenario the electricity prices should be applied based on the amount of usage, something that is already being applied for gas prices.

Mohammad-Javad Mousavi on the other hand, stressed the important role which renewables could play in supplying the country’s energy needs during the peak consumption hours.

“Renewable capacity could account for 2,000 megawatts of the country’s electricity supply by the next summer [June 2019]” he said.

EF/MA