TEHRAN – Some 1,824 households in 140 villages across Iran have been provided with electricity from the national electricity network since the beginning of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21, 2019), IRNA reported, quoting an official with Iran’s Power Generation, Distribution and Transmission Company (known as Tavanir).

According to Tavanir’s Operator for Rural Electricity Expansion Program Ali Chehel-Amirani, a total of 57,420 villages with over 4.5 million households are currently connected to the national power grid.

Over 450 billion rials (about $10 million) has been spent on supplying electricity to the mentioned new rural areas since March 2019, the official said.

The country’s rural network is comprised of 283,000 kilometers of high-voltage network as well as 86 kilometers of low-voltage networks, according to Chehel-Amirani.

Some 188 new transformers with a total capacity of 6,410 kilo-volt-ampere (kVA) have been installed across the national power network to supply electricity to rural areas, the official said.

Back in October 2019, Chehel-Amirani had announced that Tavanir was going to connect 500 new villages to the national electricity network by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 19, 2020).

According to the official, rural networks comprise 31 percent of the country's electricity distribution network.

Chehel-Amirani had earlier said that increasing the resilience of rural electricity networks is a priority for Tavanir Company and therefore having programs and resources for the development and maintenance of the network is of high importance.

Referring to the fact that nearly 99.7 percent of the country’s rural population is currently supplied with electricity, he said: “According to the information provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA), this figure is 86 percent in Central and South America, 85 percent in Asia, 78 percent in the Middle East and 36 percent in Africa.”

“Our country is in very good condition in terms of rural electricity supply,” he added.

EF/MA