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Saturday, December 27, 2008

Belenergo thinking about electricity export to Baltic states

Belarusian state-run electrical company Belenergo is considering variants of exporting electricity to the Baltic states, Belenergo Director General Pavel Yakubovich told a press conference on December 24.

The Director General remarked, at present Belarus exports electricity to Poland. Next year the export will vary from 800 million to 1 billion kWh depending on Polands consumption, said Pavel Yakubovich. Next years export will be done according to terms favourable for Belarus.

In the future Belenergo plans to expand the opportunities of exporting electricity to Poland. We are now in negotiations with Polish companies about the construction of a direct current back-to-back station on the Ross-Bialystok line, which will enable synchronised power transfer. It will be possible to transfer energy from and to Poland, said Pavel Yakubovich. The work is serious. We will soon approach the Belarusian government with a proposal to implement the project together with Polish companies.

According to the Director General, the export of electricity to the Baltic states should become a new business avenue for Belenergo. On January 1, 2010 the last power unit of the Ignalina nuclear power plant will be shut down and the region will experience an essential shortage of electricity. Belenergo should increase its export potential in this area, he said.

The Belenergo head remarked, in 2009 the export will not be huge, but there are prospects of increasing it to a large number. As Belarus will commission 1,500 MW of power-generating facilities and taking into account the launch of the nuclear power plant later, Belarus will be able to export quite a large volume of electricity to the European Union, said Pavel Yakubovich, reported BELTA.

(Source: Trend Capital)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It could be quite an export industry exporting electricity for Belarus.

Europe seems to be having trouble building new generation for political reasons. Yet they are using mroe electricity each year with all the new electronic products, and rising standard of living in Eastern Europe. So there is an opportunity for a country geographically where Belarus is.

They might have to upgrade some transmission lines too.

--aa2

Alexandra Prokopenko said...

Electric grids actually can be a problem, I touched that in one of my previous posts http://atomwatch.blogspot.com/2008/10/reflection-over-power-electric-grids-in.html If we look at this map, there is basically no connection of export capacity between Belarus and EU - only with Latvia and Lithuania which are still "electrically" a part of the old Soviet grid circle centered in Moscow. But it's a question of time until the connections are built, and there are a lot of ongoing plans with that thing.