The Operational Headquarters meeting on Energy Issues was held in a video conference mode. The President was chairing the meeting. The head of the headquarters Alexander Rosenberg reported that122 settlements were completely disconnected from gas supply at the moment. There are 51507 subscribers in rural areas without gas, more than 20 thousand are private households in cities, 1.8 thousand legal entities and entrepreneurs. Gas is supplied to multi-story buildings in limited quantities – exclusively for cooking. Gas stoves can be used in 118588 apartments. In addition, gas is currently available to 17 social facilities, 79 retail establishments, and a hundred catering establishments. The Government chairman said that the possibility of uniformly providing gas to the entire republic is being worked out (it was announced earlier that the north would be provided with gas until January 10, and the southern regions – until the January 20).
Regarding heat supply: centralized supply has been cut off in 1565 residential buildings, 147 kindergartens, and 131 schools. Taking into consideration the launch of the rolling blackout system, it is not possible to conduct the educational process remotely. It was proposed in this regard to extend the school holidays. The date has been set at January 19 for now. That is, if the situation does not change the school term will begin on Monday, January 20.
The meeting participants discussing the rolling blackouts recalled that the republic is territorially divided into 16 groups. Four groups are disconnected every four hours currently. The duration of the shutdown is 4 hours. Voltage surges are large with such a large number of blocks. It is proposed in order to soften the moments of resumption of electricity supply to change groups not after 4, but after two hours, while maintaining a four-hour period of power outage. That is, the number of groups in a block will be smaller, and the groups will be changed every two hours. It was said at the meeting that the number of electrical appliances in use has increased by 48 thousand units. The system, created in the Soviet period taking into account the needs of that time, is not coping. The employees of the Unified Energy System have replaced 1779 faulty fuses and 169 circuit breakers in just a few days. Eight transformer substations have been replaced with more powerful ones. Citizens are strongly encouraged to use equipment and machinery selectively. Another extremely important aspect: when the power supply is restored, the appliances must be disconnected from the network. Failure to comply with this simple requirement leads to a sharp voltage surge. The result is at least a hundred emergency situations per day. It is their elimination that leads to the fact that the period of absence of light in houses increases. Power engineers work non-stop. Up to two dozen additional teams work every day. Considering the convenience of using electric heaters, the meeting participants emphasized that citizens are not yet as active as they could be in using firewood for heating. At the same time, there is a supply of solid fuel and it is constantly replenished.
