Turkey Investigates Cause of Worst Power Outages in 15 Years

The most extensive power failure in 15 years disrupted services across Turkey, with the prime minister saying all possible causes including terrorism were being investigated. Bloomberg reports.

Power was restored to most of Istanbul by 1:40 p.m. on Tuesday, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said in a televised press conference from Slovakia. The outages started at 10:36 a.m., according to an energy ministry statement, which said distribution companies, power plants and transfomer substations were exchanging information. Blackouts were reported from the border with Greece to the border with Iraq, NTV said.

Power failures were becoming frequent disturbances for businesses, Suleyman Onatca, chairman of the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation, said. The Borsa Istanbul 100 fell as much as 2 percent, the most since March 26, and the lira weakened 0.4 percent.

“For the past week, electricity here has been out for hours almost every day,” Onatca said by phone from the southern city of Adana. The failures have been weighing on industrial activity for the past year, he said.

Yildiz ruled out insufficient energy supply, while saying he couldn’t yet exclude the possibility of a cyber attack. The ministry was also investigating whether a disruption at a power plant in Izmit could have created a “domino effect” of power failures nationwide, he said. The ministry has established a crisis desk, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.

Restoring Power

About half of Istanbul and Ankara and four regions including Edirne, near the Greek border, and Erzurum, closer to Armenia, had power restored about two hours after failures began, NTV reported.

Tupras Turkiye Petrol Rafinerileri AS, the country’s sole crude refiner, didn’t suffer any disruptions at its four refineries because it supplies energy from its own power plants, spokeswoman Seval Kizilcan said in a telephone interview. The refiner may feed surplus power to the national grid if required, she said. Petkim Petrokimya Holding AS, Turkey’s largest petrochemicals producer, resumed operations after a brief stoppage, said spokesman Serkan Aksuyek.

Turkey, which had 69,520 megawatts of power capacity at the end of 2014, has privatized all of its regional power distribution grids. State power producer Turkiye Elektrik Uretim AS accounts for 30 percent of national capacity. The national grid transmission system is operated by Turkiye Elektrik Iletisim AS, wholly owned by the government.

The nationwide failures expose vulnerability in Turkey’s electricity infrastructure, according to Aaron Stein, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, who wrote about the subject in a report published this year by Edam, an Istanbul-based think tank.

“Turkey has yet to formulate a policy regarding the defense of critical national infrastructure,” Stein said by e-mail from Geneva today. “Turkey has never defined critical national infrastructure and therefore does not have a national plan to defend these non-defined sites.”