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Nausėda Says Storm Exposed Gaps in Lithuania’s Power Resilience
🇱🇹 Lithuania /Energy & Infrastructure

Nausėda Says Storm Exposed Gaps in Lithuania’s Power Resilience

From Delfi · () Lithuanian

Translated from Lithuanian and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Ongoing story
  • President Gitanas Nausėda said Lithuania should expand its electricity-generator capacity and revise compensation procedures after a major storm.
  • The storm caused more than 9,000 network faults and left over 268,000 ESO customers without power at its peak; 17,000 customers remained without service on Monday morning.
  • Nausėda said network cabling should focus on the most vulnerable and main lines, while generators could provide faster support during future disasters.

Lithuania’s president says the country should rapidly increase its stock of electricity generators after a storm left hundreds of thousands of customers without power and exposed weaknesses in the response system.

In the future, I think we need to increase our electricity-generator capacity considerably.

— Gitanas NausėdaThe president called for greater generator capacity after the storm-related outages.

Gitanas Nausėda said future plans should include both greater generator capacity and clearer compensation rules. He criticized communication suggesting that the storm’s effects had been resolved while many people still lacked electricity, saying those responsible should accept accountability.

The storm that struck Lithuania on Aug. 22 caused more than 9,000 network faults. In some areas, power lines were destroyed so extensively that entire sections of the network had to be rebuilt. More than 268,000 ESO customers lost electricity at the peak of the disruption, and ESO chief executive Renaldas Radvila said 17,000 customers were still without power on Monday morning.

This exposed certain capacity gaps and algorithm gaps, but its scale was such that it was truly impossible to expect the effects to be eliminated within two or three days.

— Gitanas NausėdaNausėda assessed the scale of the disaster and the limits of the response.

ESO planned to resolve all remaining faults by Sept. 3. Private and business customers whose electricity was restored after more than 72 hours would receive compensation automatically, while ESO also said it would use a simplified process to reimburse residents for direct storm-related losses.

We must avoid such things and, of course, the people responsible should accept responsibility.

— Gitanas NausėdaHe criticized communications about the restoration of electricity supplies.

Nausėda said cabling the most vulnerable locations and main transmission lines remained necessary, but described it as a long-term effort that could not protect every line from a disaster of similar scale. He said generators could be organized much faster and help the country respond differently to another crisis.

Generator supplies could be organized in a very short time, and we could face the next crisis or disaster in a completely different frame of mind.

— Gitanas NausėdaThe president contrasted the rapid deployment of generators with the long-term nature of network cabling.
About this summary

Originally published by Delfi in Lithuanian. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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