Electricity

Cyprus runs a small, islanded power system. It still has no operating electricity interconnection to another grid, so there is nothing to import from when demand spikes: the island has to own enough plant to cover its own worst hour, and that hour falls on a summer afternoon. Almost every cost an energy buyer faces here traces back to that fact. The articles under this heading work through the consequences — how a single peak-demand figure sizes the whole system and therefore the bill, how solar reshapes the daily load curve, where storage can displace the oldest and most expensive generating units, and how utility tariffs have evolved.

For a solar asset owner this is not background reading. Tariff structure decides what a self-consumed kilowatt-hour is worth against an exported one. System peak decides when your generation is worth most to everyone else. Grid constraints decide whether you get to export at all, which is why curtailment turns up so often in the maintenance work. Several of these pieces are archived and carry figures from the year they were written; the reasoning has aged better than the numbers.