Minister of Electricity and Energy Mohamed Hamed Shaker said there is no reason to believe that the power outage that affected most of the nation Thursday was caused by sabotage. Speaking to private channel ONTV, the minister said it affected the whole nation, but added that he still needed to see a detailed analysis before knowing further details. Shaker said the reason behind the outage was a maintenance manoeuver on a 500 kV circuit in a power plant in Cairo. To carry out the maintenance, the circuit had to be disconnected. However, once disconnected, other circuits were also disconnected, despite their not supposing to, causing a power outage at 6:15am. The minister said all concerned to resurrect supply moved quickly and did their utmost to control the situation. He added that all circuits were reconnected and that power supply is currently being restored to different areas respectively, state-run MENA reported. He had estimated that it may take half an hour to restore power to some areas, and as many as five hours to restore it to other regions. Investigations into the cause of the outage are underway, the minister said. Egypt's energy shortage leads to repetitive one-hour long power outages that may occur several times a day, during summers in order to lessen loads on electricity grids. These however have been less frequent in recent weeks.
