Romania imported a lot of electricity last weekend after one of the two nuclear reactors at the Cernavoda nuclear power plant, operated by Nuclearelectrica, automatically disconnected from the country’s grid on the evening of July 19 due to a fault in the plant’s conventional part, with no consequences for nuclear safety. Weak output from wind farms has added to the shortage.

The outage occurred at a time when the country was already importing electricity from neighboring countries.

Authorities had struggled to get all available coal-fired power plants online in the preceding days, under pressure from rising consumption. Direct imports peaked at 2,000 MW, or a quarter of total consumption, on the evening of July 19.

Under normal circumstances, the event would not have caused any problems, as Romania’s cross-border transmission capacity is around 3,000 MW.

But the current situation is complicated by increased consumption in the region due to the heat wave, by the closure of generation units in neighboring countries, but also by the position of Ukraine – which has become a net importer as it has to meet its own needs, which have been further increased by the Russian attacks that destroyed 9,000 MW of generation capacity.

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