Update (0838 EST): The Albanian Electricity Distribution has confirmed the failure of their 400kV OST lines resulted in the national outages, due to load excess.
As this publication covered earlier, at around 0700 EST, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania reported nationwide power outages almost simultaneously.
Montenegro Energy and Mining Minister Mujovic has now attributed this large scale outage to grid overload and that technicians are still working to restore power to the Balkan nations. His comments read below:
”We are working on normalizing the situation and restoring the system…The consumption increased sharply due to the high temperature. In a situation of high temperatures, it happens that the air cooling is weaker, and high temperatures cause the line to fall out.”
As this publication state earlier, the region is experiencing a critical early Summer heat wave in the mid-90s which is extreme considering the average temperature for this time of year is about 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
This incident is sure to inflame tensions over EU-driven initiatives to make the Balkan nations’ energy grids more environmentally friendly. Only in 2023 the Karavasta solar plant became operational as the EU has been leveraging the Balkans to abandon their legacy Lignite plants. It is not currently clear how Karavasta performed under this excessive load season.
