Poland’s third-largest utility, is considering investments in gas, biomass and nuclear power as a lack of clear rules on carbon-dioxide emissions could push the country away from coal.
State-controlled Enea, which is building a 1,000-megawatt coal-fired facility as the 11th unit of its plant in Kozienice, central Poland, may consider a cleaner fuel if it builds a 12th generator, while switching some of the existing capacity to biomass, Chief Executive Officer Maciej Owczarek told Bloomberg News in an interview yesterday.
Enea is conducting an analysis to decide on the fuel for the 12th Kozienice unit, he said. While building a nuclear plant is an option, PGE SA, the country’s largest utility, has priority in the government’s atomic strategy, Owczarek said.
Starting in 2013 all power plants in the European Union will have to start paying for the CO2 they emit. While electricity producers in Poland and nine other new member states will get part of their allowances for free until 2020, the precise allocation won’t be set until next year. The government put its 51 percent stake in Enea up for sale last year. The Treasury Ministry failed to reach an agreement last month with Electricite de France SA, which didn’t want to commit to completing the 11th unit.
Owczarek says the 11th unit will be profitable even if it doesn’t get free CO2 emission rights. “Economic analysis has proven that the new coal-fired unit in Kozienice will be profitable even under the most pessimistic scenario,” he said.
Enea said in February last year the next 1,000 megawatts at Kozienice would be coal-fired, and that it could also build as much as 2,000 megawatts of lignite-fired capacity.
“Today the situation is a bit different,” Owczarek said. “The market is changing” and “a long-term gas deal was signed.”
Gazprom Deal
A natural-gas import agreement with Russia’s OAO Gazprom last year that secured long-term deliveries has set off a “boom” of gas-fired projects, Owczarek said. Gas emits about half as much CO2 per megawatt generated as coal, which supplies about 90 percent of Poland’s power. Enea’s reliance on coal could be reduced even further as the company may also switch some of Kozienice’s current 2,905- megawatt capacity to biomass. The company plans to upgrade as much as 1,000 megawatts of capacity, prolonging its life by about 15 years. Enea will make a decision on the upgrade and the 12th unit in the next 10 months, Owczarek said.
“We are considering biomass as one of the alternatives for the existing units,” he said. “Fifteen years is just enough for nuclear power to become a real option in the Polish energy system.”
Enea could spend 10 billion zloty ($3.64 billion) on acquisitions by 2020, according to its strategy. The company recently said it wants to buy Polish heat and power producer Elektrocieplownia Bialystok SA from Germany’s E.ON AG.
Enea is interested in the assets that Sweden’s Vattenfall AB is selling in Poland, and is analyzing a possible purchase of SPEC SA, the Warsaw heat distributor, Owczarek said today, confirming a report by the PAP news agency. Vattenfall holds 19 percent of Enea.
Source: www.bloomberg.com
