Energy imbalance is the wrong address of the energy crisis! / The Ministry of Energy's profit is in the waste of fuel.

 Mehdi Arab Sadegh Senior Expert in Energy Diplomacy
We are now facing an energy crisis in the country, and the authorities have not yet understood this situation and mistakenly think that they are in an imbalance situation! Without drawing the right scientific course of action to get out of this situation, they have come to believe the wrong statistics they give to the people and the media.
In the summer, we turn off more than 25 percent of the country's electricity consumption and pass through it with the wrong address of consumption management and imbalance. It is not clear how this imbalance is that production is always less than consumption! How is there an imbalance that has become permanent and permanent? How is it that the country's officials and planners do not offer a horizon to solve it? I hope that they will not present the Seventh Mistake-ridden Plan as an action plan, which is incompatible with the country's conditions, and of course, the various clauses of this plan are themselves contradictory.
In the winter, we cut off more than 33% of the country's gas consumption, part of which is cutting off the supply of fuel to power plants! In a situation where even with a record production of 711 million cubic meters of gas per day and in the South Pars joint fields and a daily production of about 850 million cubic meters, there is a deficit of about 300 million cubic meters of gas in the country, which in the excessive consumption of gas, the focus should be shifted to consumption, because domestic heating equipment, which consumes more than 80% of the country's gas, has very low efficiency, and this causes a gas deficit in the season. It is winter, and in practice, the electricity crisis in winter is caused by this issue. More than 80% of the energy caused by gas fuel is wasted in the residential sector, which is partly related to the lack of proper thermal insulation and the other part is related to the efficiency and temperature control of the heating equipment. In such a situation, the domestic sector produces 4 times more carbon pollution than traffic in the winter and is considered one of the main culprits of pollution.
Therefore, in the winter season, the heating consumption of the domestic sector, which is very low-efficiency, swallows more than 80% of the gas production and of course wastes more than 80% of this amount of gas, on the other hand, 93% of the power plants in our country are thermal and mostly only gas-burning and with very low efficiency, and another part of the gas is allocated for the feed of these power plants, and on the third side, industries also have inappropriate gas consumption in their cycle, and these are the most important aspects of imbalance in winter.
This intensity of gas consumption by people produces about 300 million tons of carbon annually in the heating sector alone, and has made us the fourth largest gas consumer in the world with an annual consumption of 249 billion cubic meters of gas, while we have less than half a percent of the world's GDP index and only 0.25 percent of global trade.
Iran is the third gas-producing country in the world that consumes more than 95% of its gas and wastes more than 80% of its gas in this consumption! So much so that it does not have gas to fuel its power plant in the winter, and this is painful. 
In this bitter story, the ministers of roads and urban development must be held accountable for why they considered such a chaotic pattern for construction. Of course, the Ministry of Oil must develop the oil fields and compensate for the drop in pressure.
But another question is why the average efficiency of thermal power plants, which bear more than 93 percent of the country's production capacity, should be less than 35 percent?
The reason is clear, and that is that as long as the gas fuel delivered to power plants is almost free, and now, despite the increase of more than 200 percent, it has reached 180 Rials, which is considered almost zero compared to the opportunity cost of its energy.
Naturally, if the Ministry of Energy wants to modernize and improve the efficiency of the power plant by 15 percent, it will have to spend more than $600,000 for a 160-megawatt unit to add a steam unit next to the gas power plant as a combined cycle block.

For such a process, it is nearly $100 million that the Ministry of Energy must do, and in exchange for it, while eliminating blackouts in the country and ending the vicious cycle of burning mazout, more than 700,000 cubic meters of gas are stored daily, and this saving exceeds 220 million cubic meters annually, and the opportunity cost of this considerable capacity is more than $90 million, only for one year And nothing more, while blackout and pollution damages are also eliminated.