Federation Council Shifts to Electricity
The RF Federation Council focused on Russia’s Energy Strategy, which covers the period up to 2020. The senators resolved against rewriting the strategy, which figures fail to correspond to reality, and decided to add an implementation program to it.
Federation Council focused on maladjustment of forecasted and actual figures for two days in a row. On Monday, senators canvassed oil and gas indicators. They proceeded to the electricity Tuesday. Pursuant to the strategy that the government adopted in the fall 2003, the oil industry of Russia is somewhat in 2010, not in 2005, Sergey Oganesyan, who heads the Federal Energy Agency, said more than once. The situation is no better in the power industry of the country. The strategy has failed to forecast both the 2.2 percent growth in the output and, which is even more crucial, the growth in demand of such great extent, especially in respect of the most dynamic regions of Russia – Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tyumen, Kaliningrad and Dagestan.
“No growth in energy output can keep pace with the actual increase in gross regional product,” said Vasily Zubakin, board member at RAO UES. The strategy spearheads couldn’t foresee, first, that the crude prices would be so skyrocketing and, second, that their growth would survive for so long. The tricky point is that investment figures stipulated in the strategy are also far from the real life, Zubakin pointed out, meaning the lack of funds, of course.
Nevertheless, the energy operators are in no mood to wait till the strategy happens to be in line with reality due to the funds shortage. Mosenergo that turned from the company of power surplus to the company of power shortage in two years has elaborated the strategy of its own, Anatoly Kopsov, general director of Mosenergo, said yesterday. That strategy sets forth the program to develop and upgrade the energy system of Moscow up to 2020. Mosenergo needs 47 billion rubles to construct the first five energy units with the aggregate capacity of 1725 MW. Of this amount, Mosenergo has found 27 billion rubles and may raise the remainder in loans or by releasing new stocks of the company and of its subsidiaries.
The things are even worse in the nuclear power engineering, where the investment portion of the rates is so negligent that the industry would go through stagnation and compete shutdown of the nuclear plants rather than construct new facilities, Rosenergoatom officials predict.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 07, 2005
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