Continuous power outages in Iran exacerbate livelihood and welfare problems and impose additional costs on people due to the burning of electrical appliances, while Iran’s regime is simultaneously exporting power to neighboring countries, whose money is not returned to the country.

With the arrival of July and increasing temperatures, power outages impose many problems and costs on citizens which is always without any pre-announcement, causing the obsolescence of electrical appliances and leading to high financial loss for the Iranian people.

Other problems caused by power outages include interruptions in electricity-related businesses, breakdown of workshop equipment, breakdown of electrical appliances, disruption, and accidents because of the blackout of the traffic lights, causing psychological and physical problems of staying in dark places for long times, and the failure of medical devices.

Power outages in multi-staged apartments of the metropoles can cause bigger problems because the water supply of these buildings is supported by water-pumps, which certainly will not work without power. The hygienic problems of such a thing are huge. The failure of elevators in high-rise buildings is another view of this problem.

However, in the world of communications and mass media and the use of social media by most people, alerting people to power outages is a very simple thing and costs nothing for a government that cares about its people.

Frequent power outages in different cities of the country cause many problems for citizens, but Reza Teymouri, the CEO of Tehran Electricity Distribution Company, announced on 21 July, “we have no plans for a power outage” and “we have a load limit that is temporary and occasional and this is not considered a voltage weakness.”

Instead of responding to power outages in the summer, Teymouri claimed that “if subscribers save only 10 percent on their electricity consumption, we will have no restrictions or problems in supplying electricity to subscribers.”

Despite the statement of Teymouri, Davood Rahimi, the head of the electricity district of Rey city, announced on 22 July, “The outages are not planned, and this issue is not in the possession of electricity in Rey city and is done by the Tehran province.”

The price of power also faced a significant hike in July. In other words, the increase in the price of the dollar in recent weeks has led to an increase in the inflation rate of food and non-food goods, including an increase in the price of electricity consumed by citizens.

According to the Statistics Center of Iran, which recently published the Consumer Price Index report for July 2020, “the inflation rate of the consumer goods group has been accompanied by an increase, in the main group of non-food goods and services, transportation group, entertainment and culture group, and housing group and water, electricity and gas have had the biggest price increases.”

Despite Iran’s problem in electricity, the regime is exporting power to neighboring countries such as Iraq, where its money is not returned to the country.

Iraq is unable to pay for gas and electricity imported from Iran because of US sanctions imposed on the Tehran regime. Of course, Iraq is not the only country where the regime exports electricity.

Minister of Energy Reza Ardakanian stated that the regime, “has electrical connections with most of the countries that have land borders and exports part of its electricity to [them].”

Officials have repeatedly reported that Iraq has a $2 billion debt to the regime for electricity and gas exports. But Iraqi officials say the money was deposited in an account at the Commercial Bank of Iraq, and because of sanctions, the regime can only import goods from Iraq.

During a visit to Baghdad on 3 June, Reza Ardakanian announced that “a two-year contract for the export of electricity to Iraq has been signed between the two countries.”

“All electricity export contracts to Iraq have been for one year before that, but during this trip, negotiations were finalized and a two-year electricity export contract for 2020 and 2021 was signed with the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity,” he said.

Statistics released by the regime show that Iraq has always been a customer of more than 80% of the regime’s electricity exports. Also, the statistics of the Ministry of Energy show that the regime’s electricity exports increased by more than 28% in 2019 and reached over 8 TWh.

Source » irannewsupdate