The Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has blamed this year's repeated power cuts on “distribution networks, Chinese air conditioners and homes with no thermal insulation”, Al-Hayat Arabic daily reported on Wednesday. It also quoted SEC Executive President Ali Al-Barrak as saying the company was in need of “SR300 billion to install networks in the coming years”. While Al-Barrak promised a better service in the future – “almost 95 percent of the country will have been connected to the electricity grid by next month” – he did not rule out the reoccurrence of power cuts. He also blamed the press for the reaction of the public. “The media has exaggerated the issue of power cuts and some customers go to the newspapers before making their complaints known to the company,” he said. “The Electricity and Co-Generation Regulatory Authority has never penalized the SEC on the back of complaints because the company meets international standards.” The last two months, however, have seen the SEC pay compensation to an unspecified number of members of the public for “errors” on which Al-Barrak did not wish to elaborate. “Electricity is returned within four hours at the most after power failures,” he said. “If the outage persists longer than that, then other measures are taken.” “Some people use types of Chinese-made air-conditioners which lead to overloads,” Al-Barrak told Al-Hayat, adding: “Most buildings in the south of Riyadh are not thermally insulated and that increases consumption.” The National Water Company (NWC) has said, meanwhile, that it has improved services, reduced cuts in the water supply, and made “unprecedented achievements”, according to Al-Hayat. The newspaper said, however, that the NWC statement published Tuesday conflicted with reports from inhabitants of Riyadh who complain of having to resort to purchasing water from other sources due to failures in supply, and using water facilities at mosques and restaurants. “The cuts in supply are continuous, and some areas have no water for weeks on end,” one Riyadh resident said. The NWC statement claimed, Al-Hayat said, that requests for water tanker trucks had fallen by 50 percent due to improvements in the pumping system and operational capacity.
