Judging by the Available Daily Generation Capacity from EAC units, as published by the Transmission System Operator, it appears that this year a more conservative maintenance schedule was adopted — to avoid the bad luck of overlapping with plunging night-time temperatures and the spike in consumption that follows.
You may recall that last winter, for a stretch, available generation dropped below a thousand megawatts thanks to breakdowns and maintenance work. On some bitterly cold nights, meeting demand was a white-knuckle affair. Or, frankly, a matter of sheer luck.
The EAC’s maximum nominal generation capacity hasn’t budged from last year to this. And based on what we heard from the EAC chairman yesterday, it won’t increase in the years ahead either. We’re sitting on the Vasilikos fiasco, which will delay the introduction of natural gas by several more years — leaving PEC’s units at Vasilikos idle (assuming they even get licensed), along with EAC’s Unit 6.
And just when we thought — last year — that by 2027–28 we might see a boost in generation through flexible generators at Dhekelia, the EAC chairman told parliament yesterday that the whole thing has gone sideways. Getting those generators within the next four years is now impossible. The deal the EAC struck with Greek firm TERNA (after a roughly two-year procurement process) stipulated delivery of the Siemens generators within 36 months. Then, out of nowhere, as Mr Petrou put it, Siemens announced it couldn’t meet the 36-month deadline. It would need another 18 on top.
What are we supposed to think? That TERNA executives — or Siemens, for that matter — fed us reassurances about a three-year delivery to land the contract, and the moment the deal was signed, it became four-plus years? And what exactly are we supposed to do in the meantime? What happens if four years stretch into five and natural gas still hasn’t arrived to fire up the 420 megawatts sitting dormant at Vasilikos? And what do we tell the European Commission when 2029 rolls around and Brussels demands we retire the Dhekelia steam boilers — all 360 megawatts of installed capacity — as we’ve committed to doing? How do we meet constantly rising demand when all we seem to manage is shrinking our generation capacity instead of expanding it?
Definitive decisions? There are none. Not from the EAC. Not from the Transmission System Operator. Not from CERA. Not from the Ministry of Energy. For summer 2026, the only thing that can save us is blind luck — and the hope that nothing major breaks down in the ageing units at Dhekelia and Moni.
From 2027 onwards, the pressures will be greater and the risks to secure electricity supply more acute. There is a glimmer of hope that by this time next year, the TSO’s centralised grid storage system might be operational — with the prayer that, at the very least, the most urgent problems can be managed. But will the TSO get it done in time? And will private interests let them deploy state-owned centralised storage for the public good? We’ll see.
Storage, though, only mitigates certain supply problems under the right conditions — it cannot replace actual generation capacity. That’s what many technocrats keep saying. Others within the EAC believe that given how things are shaping up — with the Siemens generators hopelessly delayed (if the order isn’t cancelled outright) — the most viable path to supply security is to rapidly scale up the Authority’s storage capacity. So far, a contract for 80 megawatts of storage at Dhekelia has been awarded, and CERA recently licensed the EAC for another 100 megawatts at Moni. Add to that 120 megawatts of grid-level storage from the TSO. All of it designed to cover needs lasting two to four hours. If the EAC rushes to add more storage capacity, will it be enough to avert the looming supply shortfall in 2027, 2028, 2029? Plenty of people say no, it won’t.
It’s high time the responsible authorities came out and gave us a proper, official, accountable answer.
