Temperatures reached record highs of 55 degrees Celsius in the desert state last week, sending power consumption to 99 percent of the country's 11,000 megawatts of maximum power output capacity on Tuesday.

"The Subbiya power plant will relieve Kuwait from the ghost of 99 percent, and next year we'll get over the problem," Minister Badr Al-Shuraian told Kuwait's parliament.

Parliament called a special meeting on Sunday to discuss the situation and the repeated outages in some areas because of transformers failing under the increased load.

Subbiya, which is being constructed by General Electric Co, would produce 1,320 MW in the summer of 2011. It would operate at full capacity of 2,000 MW in 2012, Minister Shuraian told Parliament.

Kuwait has built no new power stations since 1988, the minister said. Demand has been rising at a rate of 8 percent a year for the last 40 years, another minister said.

The government has a monopoly on all utilities in Kuwait, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter.

The country has plans to reform the state-dominated economy to give a bigger role to the private sector. Upstream oil and gas will remain off limits, but Parliament has approved a law to establish public shareholding companies to build electrical power and water desalination plants.

Separately, state news agency KUNA said on Sunday, the government has approved a 1,500 megawatt (MW) power plant in al-Zour.

Air conditioning strains the capacity of the power grid, accounting for some 70 percent of power demand in a country which has among the highest per capita consumption of power in the world.

Around 5,000 of the country's 28,000 transformers did not meet the standards needed for Kuwait and were being gradually replaced, the minister said.

The government would hire international power companies as advisers, he said.

Most underground power cables in Kuwait are 30 to 40 years old and they need to be replaced, one power official told the house in a presentation.

The ageing cables caused up to 80 percent of power outages last week, he said. The ministry has signed contracts to have them replaced, he added.

Kuwait is considering nuclear energy to face growing demand for power.