By Hani Amara
Aug 12 (Reuters) – The General Electricity Company of Libya said on Wednesday that an attack on the South Zawiya substation caused a complete outage and loss of power supply to wide areas south of the city of Zawiya.
The Libyan electricity provider said U.S. company GE had halted all work at the Zawiya power station and withdrawn its technical teams following the latest attack, pending an improvement in the security conditions. More than 700 megawatts of the plant’s total 1,300 MW of generation capacity remained unavailable, it added.
The attack followed explosive-laden drone strikes on fuel storage tanks at the nearby Zawiya oil complex, which hosts Libya’s largest operating refinery.
Renewed violence in the strategic Libyan city of Zawiya has disrupted the oil industry in the OPEC member country, with the country’s National Oil Corporation saying it could declare force majeure if drone attacks on energy assets in the city continued.
(Reporting by Hani Amara, Writing by Tala Ramadan; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
