Electricity restored across Prague after outage in part of the city lasted around 15 minutes

Electricity has been restored across Prague. The power outage in part of the city, especially in the areas of Nové Město, Vinohrady and Nusle, lasted around 15 minutes. Karel Hanzelka, a spokesperson for Prague Energy (PRE), told ČTK. The fault occurred at one of the city’s substations, and energy workers have so far resolved the situation by rerouting the power supply.

According to the information available so far, today’s outage affected only parts of the capital. It was not a massive power outage like the one recorded in Czechia on 4 July. At the time, electricity was unavailable in some parts of the country for several hours, affecting around one million customers. The country has 6.3 million connection points.

Today’s outage began shortly after 11:30. According to Hanzelka, the problems were caused by a fault at the Střed substation, and energy workers are now investigating its cause. In the meantime, they restored power by switching the direction of supply to the grid, with other substations ensuring electricity supply. Hanzelka said the capital’s extensive grid connections made it possible to restore supply quickly.

No outages have been reported in the regions so far. The situation from July, when several outages occurred at the same time and left part of the country without electricity, has not been repeated. According to information released so far by the transmission system operator, the initial cause was a phase conductor breaking—a cable that carries electricity between power plants and substations. This took the V411 backbone line out of service. The line is used to evacuate large amounts of power from power plants and transmit electricity over long distances. Shortly afterwards, a unit at the Ledvice power plant in the Teplice area and the large Krasíkov substation in the Ústí nad Orlicí area also went offline. Due to the heavy load, the dispatcher also switched off the V208 line, which connects substations. Energy workers are still investigating the exact cause of the problems at the time, and the results are expected within a few months.

Around noon, Prague firefighters responded to three incidents involving people trapped in elevators due to the power outage in part of the city. “Outages are usually brief and don’t last long; electricity supply is restored within a few minutes,” Miroslav Řezáč, a spokesperson for Prague’s fire brigade, told ČTK.

Tram services in central Prague also came to a standstill for several minutes due to the interruption in power supply, and a brief outage of around five minutes also affected the metro. “Tram services have experienced repeated short-term outages, mainly in the city centre,” the transport company said on its website. According to the company, the disruption to services caused by the power outage lasted from 11:38 to 12:00.