Saudi’s SEC apologises for power outage in the southern region, offers compensation

Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has announced that power services have been restored in the southern region of the kingdom following disruptions in certain areas due to bad weather conditions.

Electricity services were interrupted in cities and villages in Asir, Jazan, Najran, Al Baha and some governorates in the southwestern part of the Makkah region in the last few days.

SEC apologised for the issue, and on Monday, the company’s board also decided to compensate subscribers affected by the outage by deducting 25 per cent of their consumption value for June 2019.

High winds caused the high-voltage transmission towers to fall, which led to one of the major stations to go out of service, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

Some of the substations also faced an impact, and in turn, power supply to some areas was affected.

SEC’s field teams of engineers and technicians worked to address the interruptions and were gradually able to restore service to the affected areas, the report said.

Although electricity services were first returned on Saturday morning, they were again cut off in the afternoon due to a malfunction in the steam station.

The company explained that during the process of restoring the station and connecting it to the network, there was a technical failure in one of the generators.

All the faults have now been repaired and the network has been restarted, SEC stressed.