The situation with electricity is critically stable – СOO Metinvest

The situation with the supply of electricity to Metinvest’s steel plants is currently critically stable. Oleksandr Myronenko, the company’s operations director, told about this in an interview with the German Suddeutsche Zeitug.

According to him, the company was able to stop importing electricity from abroad, as it was in August or early September of this year.

«We imported electricity, because at that time the population was often cut off for several hours, and we had to maintain uninterrupted production. Currently, we can provide ourselves with electricity of Ukrainian production only,» explained COO to Metinvest.

However, as Myronenko noted, electricity production has been significantly disrupted not only due to the destruction of power plants, but also due to the destroyed infrastructure.

«Electricity must not only be produced, but also transmitted and transformed. Transporting electricity, for example, from a nuclear power plant through transformers to our factories is currently one of the biggest problems. The plant used to have three different power lines, but now there is only one. If there is an accident, we will not be able to switch to another line. Like recently, when we were forced to completely stop production at one enterprise. But steel, in particular in blast furnaces, is produced continuously,» he said.

The company’s operations director added that if production stops without preparation, it may take 1-3 weeks to resolve all problems.

As GMK Center reported earlier, like other large businesses, Metinvest has projects to develop its own generation. The company has already contracted more than 30 MW of gas turbine plants for $36 million, which are to be installed at the group’s enterprises in November of this year. In addition, 50 MW of generation has been installed in case of emergency situations, which allows you to safely stop production in case of loss of power from the power system.

Also, employees of Metinvest mining and beneficiation plants are learning the algorithm of safe actions in case of blackouts. It provides for a system of communications between all links, the distribution of functions and areas of responsibility between different services. Measures take into account both scheduled and emergency power outages.