Kaliningrad energy is closed to business – Newspaper Kommersant No. 9 (7454) of 19.01.
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As Kommersant expected, the suspension of electricity exports from Kaliningrad to Lithuania will lead to a slight increase in energy prices for industry in the European part of the Russian Federation and the Urals. Electricity exporter Inter RAO will stop paying for the power capacity of its own new Kaliningrad TPPs for 900 MW, which are paid off through non-market payments by all consumers. The load on the industry will increase by 70 million rubles. in a year. Consumers consider it fair to lay these costs on the owner of excess TPPs, which is also Inter RAO.
As Kommersant found out, Inter RAO (a monopoly exporter of electricity) managed to reduce its payment for the capacity of new thermal power plants in the Kaliningrad region due to the suspension of electricity exports to Lithuania. Exports stopped on May 22, 2022, but Inter RAO continued to pay for the capacity of the TPP, since the payment was calculated based on the supply volume for the last 12 months. Now the regulator proposes to calculate the payment based on the volume of exports for the last six months. The issue will be considered on January 23 at a meeting of the supervisory board of the “Market Council” (energy market regulator).
Inter RAO, together with Rosneftegaz, built four 900 MW thermal power plants in the Kaliningrad region for autonomous operation of the exclave’s energy system when the energy systems of the Baltic countries are disconnected from Russia. The construction of the thermal power plant, taking into account the infrastructure, was estimated at 185 billion rubles. TPPs pay off, among other things, at the expense of a premium to the price for capacity for consumers of the first price zone (the European part of the Russian Federation and the Urals).
The Ministry of Energy developed changes to the calculation of payment for capacity for Inter RAO in the Kaliningrad region in the fall of 2022. At that time, Inter RAO reported to the Ministry of Energy that since June, from the Kaliningrad region in the direction of the Baltic countries, “exclusively the flow has been carried out within the framework of deviations in the parallel operation of the BRELL energy ring (connects Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania)”. The total volume of exports fell by 24 times – to 7.5 MW, it was said in the company’s response to the draft resolution of the Ministry of Energy. According to Litgrid (Lithuanian grid operator), in less than five months, exports from the Kaliningrad region to Lithuania amounted to 0.67 billion kWh.
Since June 2022, Inter RAO has been paying for about 67 MW of capacity per month. In June-September 2022, the company “overpaid 275 million rubles for capacity”, the payment for November could exceed 111 million rubles.
The company asked the Ministry of Energy to change the calculation of capacity from November 1 last year. Inter RAO’s response noted that the company could not refuse deliveries within the framework of BRELL, since “this requires the physical disconnection of interstate power lines, which does not apply to Inter RAO’s powers.” Inter RAO did not respond to Kommersant’s request.
Now Inter RAO can completely stop paying for the power capacity of new TPPs. “If within six months the amount of peak power consumption of the exporter is zero, then the volume of the mandatory purchase of the exporter’s capacity starting from the seventh month will become zero,” explained Kommersant in the Market Council. They specify that the new rules will come into force no earlier than the date of adoption of the relevant draft government decree.
As a result, capacity prices for consumers in the European part of the Russian Federation and the Urals will increase: the premium for the capacity of Kaliningrad thermal power plants, according to the preliminary assessment of Market Council experts, may increase by about 0.25%.
According to Kommersant’s information, in 2022 the volume of the premium exceeded 26 billion rubles, due to the stoppage of exports, the volume of the premium could increase by 70 million rubles.
At the same time, the single-rate price of the energy market will increase by only 0.0045%, experts of the Market Council calculated.
“It would be logical to entrust the maintenance of excess generation to the initiator of construction and the owner of excess capacities, but it so happened that Inter RAO is also the same,” say the Energy Consumer Community (which unites industrial consumers of electricity). to shift the costs, definitely nothing to do with it. ” In 2021, the total generation in the Kaliningrad region amounted to 6.6 billion kWh, while domestic consumption was 4.7 billion kWh. Electricity exports to Lithuania in 2021 amounted to 1.81 billion kWh.
“Inter RAO” actually does not have the ability to export to Lithuania either now or in the foreseeable future in the next 12 months, so it is logical to find a new design of market rules applicable in the new reality, says Sergey Rozhenko from Kept. Moving to a six-month average of exports effectively solves this problem, he adds.
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