New Electricity Outage Queue: How the Point System Works in Kyiv and Regions.

According to ТСН: A new scheme for managing electricity restrictions has been introduced in the capital and several regions of Ukraine due to a power deficit - the so-called 'queues' of outages.

This system was explained in detail by the director of the Energy Research Center, Oleksandr Kharchenko. According to him, the queue system is designed for precise management of the amount of power being cut off, depending on the existing deficit in the region's energy system.

'A queue is essentially the disconnection of a certain number of megawatts of power when there is an energy shortage in the region. In other words, the queues are designed to disconnect a certain number of megawatts of power when they simply do not exist in that region at that moment,' explained Oleksandr Kharchenko.

He also noted that one full queue can correspond to a significant amount of power.

'Queue number six means that 600 MW of power is disconnected when that queue is turned off. Although this varies in some regions, typically it can be stated that a queue is around 600 MW,' assured Kharchenko.

In the expert's opinion, the 'queues' system was introduced to increase flexibility and more accurately manage the load when the power deficit is less than the total volume of a queue.

'What is this for? When it is necessary to disconnect not 600 but 300 megawatts to avoid disconnecting all 600, we divided the queue into halves. Consequently, 300 were disconnected, 300 were not disconnected at that moment when there is such an opportunity,' the expert noted.

Oleksandr Kharchenko emphasized that this division allows dispatchers to respond quickly to changes in generation and recovery of capacities. If additional generation appears or a substation is restored that can supply, for example, 300 MW, the dispatcher can connect only half of the queue (for instance, 'queue 4.2') to the network without waiting for the necessary power to restore the entire queue.

The expert also provided an example of the system's operation under significant deficits typical for Kyiv.

'When, say, in Kyiv under conditions of consuming 1.4 GW of power, there are only 800 MW available, unfortunately, a larger part - indeed, about 50%, possibly 60% - of the queues will be in the 'off' state, and only those for which there is enough electricity will be switched on at this moment. So this is how it works,' summed up Oleksandr Kharchenko.

It should be noted that electricity consumption is increasing in Ukraine, thus maintaining the need for economical use of resources. Against the backdrop of new attacks by Russia on energy infrastructure, limitation schedules for businesses and hourly outages are in effect.

Earlier, Oleksandr Kharchenko mentioned that companies responsible for repairing and restoring energy facilities have virtually no reserves to eliminate new large-scale destructions.

In the context of an unstable situation in the energy sector, it is important to properly organize the disconnection processes, as this directly affects the quality of life for people and the stability of enterprise operations. The introduction of new management schemes emphasizes the need for effective resource management under limited possibilities of the energy system.