With the number of electricity blackouts increasing to five times a day of each one hour the government has announced measure to increase the electric capacity. One of the measures is adding electricity stations to the national grid by the beginning of September, according to Saturday statements of the minister of electricity. However, the outages are expected to continue as their primary cause – failure to pay petroleum dues owed to foreign oil companies – remains "neglected" , Founding General Director of the Egyptian Electric Utility and Consumer Protection Regulatory Agency (Egyptera) Mohamed El-Sobky stated. Power cuts has caused trouble to some services delivered to citizens, as on Saturday residents of Mohandessin neighbourhood in Giza complained that they were not able to pay internet bills due to outages. El-Sobky commented that the government should protect small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from the negative effect of power outages. With the aim of ensuring the fair distribution of electricity outages throughout the country, Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb visited the National Energy Control Centre (NECC) along with electricity minister Mohamed Shaker. Mehleb attributed the electricity crisis to the current extended maintenance works at stations in addition to a shortage of natural gas supplies to the stations, adding that the government is working on accelerating the maintenance and boosting supplies. During the visit, Mehleb said that Egypt needs 26,657 megawatt (MW) in order to cover electricity needs, noting that the current capacity is 23,133MW, what results in a capacity shortage of around 3,000MW. Mehleb issued a decree to form an expert committee charged with reviewing the capabilities of each power station and will submit its report within a week, according to Shaker. Egypt needs EGP 170m per day, and EGP 58bn per year to produce electricity and in the summer, it needs an additional EGP 60m per day, according to head of Egyptera Hafez Salmawy. Egyptera is currently finalising preparations to provide a new service to send SMS messages to customers informing them of the hours and locations of outages for customers via the three mobile networks.
