REUTERS
Crimea's de facto head Sergey Aksyonov announces the state of emergency in Crimea, introduced due to energy shortages last November, will stay effective at least till May 1, 2016, according to Russian news agency TASS.
"The crisis management center will keep working up to the last day of the emergency situation, at least till May 1. All should stay at their work places," Aksyonov told local officials at a meeting of the crisis management center on Thursday as he reviewed the immediate tasks facing the local authorities, TASS said.
Aksyonov said the timetables of rolling blackouts would have to be adjusted without delay. All boiler rooms are to receive power supply on the permanent basis to keep temperatures inside apartment buildings at the proper level. All municipalities are obliged to present by January 10 the schedules local industries and businesses will have to stick to amid power shortages.
As the head of Crimea's Emergencies Ministry, Sergey Shakhov, has said, the peninsula was getting 933 megawatts of electricity, including 400 megawatts via two high-voltage power cables laid under the Kerch Strait from mainland Russia's Krasnodar Territory. The available power supply is capable of meeting 85% of the demand. "There are no communities where electricity is utterly unavailable," he said.
The emergency situation has been effective in Crimea since November 22, when all four power supply lines bringing electricity from neighboring Ukraine went dead in blasts at the administrative border of mainland Ukraine and Russian-annexed Crimea.
The situation improved somewhat when on December 2 the first power cable was laid to Crimea from the Krasnodar Territory of Russia and on December 15 another one doubled the lifeline's capacity to 400 megawatts. Two more such cables will be commissioned next spring to make Crimea completely independent from Ukrainian electricity.