Albania and the countries of the Balkans in "black out", the EC launches an international investigation into the power outage

Albania and some of the countries of the Western Balkans were engulfed by a collapse the day before after a fault cut off the electricity for almost 40 minutes, on a day where the temperatures reached over 40 degrees Celsius.

Montenegrin officials claim that the cause of the regional breakdown of the electric power system is a consequence of the heavy load and the increase in daily consumption and high temperatures. Montenegrin media "Vijesti" reports that an international investigation will be launched by the Official Association of European Transmission System Operators that will determine where the problems started.

In the first reports, some regional media reported that Montenegro was responsible for the fault in the region, and then reported that the collapse was caused by problems on the border between Albania and Greece.

Albanian Energy Minister Belinda Baluku confirmed that there was a failure in the interconnection between Albania and Greece and that she had heard of similar circumstances in Montenegro and parts of Croatia and Bosnia.

The investigation will last six months

Croatian officials, as reported by local media, officially announced that the theoretical collapse could have hit all of Europe because energy systems are interconnected and that it is irresponsible to make assumptions before the official investigation by European bodies, which usually takes a long time. six months.

"We are witnessing a regional breakdown of the power system, and to blame Montenegro for this would be extremely wrong. The problem arose as a result of a very heavy load, an increase in the daily load and very high temperatures. The whole this leads to the fact that the current cannot be transmitted properly and we are coming to what happened today", said Minister of Energy and Mines Sasha Mujović in an official speech to the media.

Power was gradually restored an hour after the outage.

In his first statement after the accident, Mujović officially explained to "Vijesta" that as soon as we have a high temperature, it immediately happens that the air cooling of the airlines is weak. This, as he stated, leads to the fact that due to the high load and high temperature, the line drops and breaks, and then a load is created on the other line.

"The bad situation is that at the moment when the failure occurred, all consumers remained connected. We hope that at the moment of connection there will not be a heavy load and it will not cause new interruptions" , Mujovic said.

The executive director of CGES, Ivan Asanovic, officially told "Vijesta", immediately after the accident, that as a result of a concern on a regional scale, there was a power outage in the entire territory of Montenegro, except for the north. He also said that the disaster also happened in the surrounding countries - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and a significant part of Croatia.

"The cause is still unknown and CGES in cooperation with colleagues from the surrounding area is working to solve the problem and ensure energy supply to all consumers in Montenegro", said Asanović.