Failure at Vasilikos power unit left parts of Cyprus without electricity for seven minutes

A brief failure in Cyprus’s power supply system occurred on 4 September: at 11:13, power unit AT/Σ 3 at the Vasilikos power station (Vasiliko) failed while operating at a load of 99 MW. Due to the loss of generation capacity, consumer load was automatically shed in different parts of the island, and the power went out.

According to the Cyprus Transmission System Operator (ΔΣΜΚ), electricity supply to consumers affected by the technical fault was fully restored at 11:20 — the outage lasted about seven minutes. The operator did not report the cause of the unit’s failure.

The Vasilikos power station is Cyprus’s largest generating facility and is owned by the Electricity Authority of Cyprus (EAC). Failures at its units have continued to recur this year: on 10 July, the loss of unit AT/Σ 1 operating at a load of 60 MW left parts of the island without electricity for 27 minutes, while on 21 May the same unit dropped out of the system at a load of 65 MW, and restoration took 22 minutes.

During the summer, Cyprus’s power system was operating at its limit: in July, rolling outages were introduced in different areas because of insufficient generation capacity on the island, with a separate list of affected addresses published.