“Government offices in Iran are closed or operating on reduced hours, and schools and colleges have switched to online learning due to the energy crisis. Source: The New York Times Details: In addition, highways and shopping malls were plunged into darkness, and industrial plants were without power, bringing production to a near-total halt.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Government offices in Iran are closed or operating on reduced hours, and schools and colleges have switched to online learning due to the energy crisis.
Source: The New York Times
Details: In addition, highways and shopping malls were plunged into darkness, and industrial plants were cut off, bringing production to an almost complete halt.
The paper notes that while Iran has some of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas and crude oil, it is experiencing a full-scale energy crisis that can be attributed to years of sanctions, ineffective governance, aging infrastructure, wasteful consumption — and targeted attacks by Israel.
Although Iran has been struggling with infrastructure problems for years, the president warned that the problem has reached a critical point.
For most of last week, the country was effectively shut down to conserve energy. While ordinary Iranians were outraged and industry leaders warned that the resulting losses would amount to tens of billions of dollars.
Officials said the shortage of gas needed to run the country is about 350 million cubic meters per day, and as temperatures plummeted and demand soared, officials were forced to resort to extreme measures to ration the gas.
The government faced two tough elections. Either stop the supply of gas to residential buildings, or stop the supply to the power plantwhich produce electricity. The government chose the latter option, as cutting off gas to residential buildings would pose a serious security threat and cut off the main source of heat for most Iranians.
By December 20, 17 power plants were completely out of order, and the rest were only partially operational.
State-owned energy company Tavanir has warned of massive blackouts that could last for days or weeks.