By Libya Herald reporters.
Tripoli and Benghazi, 23 January 2016:
The cold snap has produced widespread power cuts all over Libya with Kufra . . .[restrict]being without electricity for almost one and a half days. As consumers turned up their heating to keep warm, the system simply could not cope.
State power company GECOL struggled to balance the load by cutting electricity to different areas at different times. Thus in Tripoli, outages have ranged from seven to 12 hours a day and in Benghazi parts of the city have been without power for up to nine hours. However the real suffering has been in Kufra where until it was restored this morning, most of the town had reportedly been without power for no less than 35 hours.
Temperatures were higher today, thus lightening demand. But GECOL continues to ask people to cut back on their power usage wherever possible.
The problems in Benghazi have been compounded by continuing damage to electricity infrastructure in the west of the city where the fighting with IS is focused. Destroyed overhead and underground cabling had imposed a dangerous load on the surviving transmission lines, forcing GECOL to limit power flows, a company manager explained today. Work is meanwhile continuing at Benghazi North power station to repair damage from an IS rocket attack last week. [/restrict]
