Update: Weak Turkish spot feeds into mass blackout – traders

Aura Sabadus

31-Mar-2015

Turkey’s physical electricity market suffered a mass-blackout on Tuesday, which some traders put down to, among other things, a lack of secondary reserve following the shutdown of thermal generation.

This came in the wake of low spot prices which market sources said had fallen to levels at which thermal power plants could not operate.

On Sunday, for example, thermal production dropped to an average 374GWh, the lowest so far this year. However, other traders noted that the fall in thermal production had been compensated by a surge in hydro generation.

Turkey’s spot power market has have bumped along this year. During March, baseload power has delivered at an average TL124.24/MWh (€43.82/MWh), a TL28.01/MWh, or 19%, discount to the last ICIS assessment of the forward product.

Comparatively, baseload delivered at TL139.44/MWh on the exchange PMUM during March 2014.

Despite the blackout, Wednesday’s Day-ahead Baselaod price out-turned at TL126.66/MWh, only fractionally higher than Tuesday’s TL104.41/MWh.

Electricity was being restored in most Turkish cities on Tuesday afternoon after the blackout, which hit 44 of 81 provinces.

The shutdown started at 10.36 on Tuesday morning, bringing to a halt large swathes of industrial production, transport and the internet in some parts of the country.

The cause of the blackout was initially the e subject of much speculation, with sources active in the market putting forward several reasons including a cyber-attack.

A source at grid operator TEIAS told ICIS it had been dealing with problems at a 2GW thermal power plant in the north-west of the country.

The TEIAS source did not comment on the nature of the issue, but a source in the market said there had been reports of an explosion at the plant.

However the TEIAS source argued that an outage at the power plant would have caused a regional, rather than a national blackout.

Shutdown

Another participant said the frequency on a key line had surged to 60Hz, some 10Hz above the normal average, prompting the system to shut down.

There were reports that physical flows on the interconnection lines with Bulgaria and Greece had stopped, although the Bulgarian line was thought to have re-opened by noon.

A source at the Greek transmission system operator ADMIE said he was working with his Turkish colleagues at TEIAS to restore the interconnection. ADMIE said a similar interruption happened on Monday morning, but the interconnection had been restored within an hour.

One market participant said electricity was likely to be fully restored in Istanbul by 17:00 Turkish time.

Another source said most thermal power plants which were switched off in the western Thrace region earlier in the morning had gone back online in the afternoon.

A third source said his company was preparing to ramp up a plant in the Thrace region, but there were reports the grid was still unstable.

A fourth source said electricity had been restored in the western city of Izmir, although the eastern part of the country and the southern coast were still struggling with the outage.

A source at Turkish electricity grid operator said TEIAS staff were working to fix the issue, but could not comment on the cause of the blackout when contacted later in the afternoon. Aura Sabadus and Irina Peltegova

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