Persistent drought and successive extreme heatwaves have driven water levels on the Danube River to historic lows.
The prolonged dry conditions have severely reduced water levels along one of Europe’s most important rivers, disrupting navigation, threatening ecosystems and raising concerns about water supplies and electricity demand across several countries.
In Hungary, the Danube’s level in the capital, Budapest, fell to around 10 centimeters (4 inches), well below the previous record low of 33 centimeters (13 inches) recorded in 2018. The unusually low level has exposed large sections of the riverbed and highlighted the severity of the ongoing drought affecting the region.
The Danube’s water flow has also fallen to 1,500 cubic meters per second in Romania, less than a third of its July average.
Water levels are not expected to rise on the Danube in the coming days or even weeks as no significant rainfall is forecast, and as a renewed extreme heat wave bears down on the region with daytime highs topping 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), electricity and water use are on the rise.
Authorities in several countries along the Danube are closely monitoring the river’s condition as low water levels begin affecting traffic on one of Europe’s busiest inland waterways.
The Danube stretches nearly 2,900 kilometers from Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea, passing through or bordering 10 countries and serving as a vital transport corridor for trade, tourism and agriculture. Millions of people also rely on the river for drinking water, irrigation and industrial activities.
Governments Taking Measures To Avert Energy Crisis
Meanwhile, numerous governments across Central and Eastern Europe are taking steps to conserve electricity and avert an energy crisis as record low water levels on the Danube River.
The Danube’s record low levels have pushed Hungary’s only nuclear power plant, the Soviet-built, four-reactor plant at Paks, to the brink of powering down entirely for the first time in its 44 years in service.The Paks plant, which uses water from the Danube to cool its reactors, on Monday was producing only 240 megawatts of power rather than the usual 2,000 due to successive power-downs of its four reactors.
In video posted to Facebook today, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said that engineers had managed to keep the plan’s final operating turbine temporarily running, averting an expected shutdown on the weekend.
Magyar stated that a full power-down will likely only happen on Tuesday or Wednesday. “This is very good news, because the complete shutdown of the Paks power plant can still be avoided, at least temporarily, on one of the biggest consumption days,” he said.
The Paks plant, located around 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Budapest, accounts for nearly half of Hungary’s electricity production and around a third of its consumption. Hungary has relied on regional electricity imports as well as renewable sources to try to make up for the deficit from the Paks plant.
Last week, Hungary’s government asked major industrial users to curb their electricity consumption and sought voluntary savings from households in order to conserve supply, particularly in peak demand hours between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m.
It also announced that electric-powered freight trains would not be permitted to run during peak hours beginning on Monday in order to conserve an estimated 70 to 90 megawatt-hours of electricity per day.
While conservation measures were initially voluntary, Magyar’s government on Saturday issued a decree allowing for them to be made mandatory for large industrial or commercial consumers. He said today that the conservation push had resulted in 700 fewer megawatts of electricity being used the previous day, and thanked Hungarians for their efforts.
Meanwhile, plants in neighboring countries have also seen dramatic drops in power generation, as well as disruptions to shipping and agriculture. Today, Romania’s military used 180 kilograms (397 pounds) of explosives to blast rock near the lower Danube’s Bala Canal in an effort to redirect water into the river’s main channel and toward the state-owned Cernavoda nuclear power plant.
Authorities have already shut down one reactor unit at the Cernavoda plant, which is operating at about half its normal capacity. Acting Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan announced a nationwide state of alert in the energy sector on Friday, and warned that the Danube’s low water levels threatened the shutdown of Cernavoda’s second reactor. He appealed to citizens to voluntarily limit electricity usage in peak evening hours.
In Serbia, record-low Danube levels have pushed the country’s key hydroelectric plant to operate with only 20% of its capacity, prompting Prime Minister Djuro Macut to preside over an emergency meeting today focusing on energy problems. Macut appealed to residents to “minimize the use of big consumers of electricity in their homes, such as air conditioners.”
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