PRESS: Ministry against delay of launches of waste power plants

MOSCOW, Apr 28 (PRIME) -- The Russian Energy Ministry has not supported cancellation of fines for the delays of launches of five waste waste-fired power plants of RT-Invest in the Moscow Region and Kazan due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kommersant business daily reported on Wednesday.

Under the current capacity supply agreements, each month of delay would result in a fine of 25% of a guaranteed payment for power. VTB Capital analyst Vladimir Sklyar said that RT-Invest’s fine for the delays of all five plants may amount to 557 million rubles per month or 6.7 billion rubles per year. The one-year delay would also mean that the company would not get 26.7 billion rubles of payments for capacities, Sklyar said.

RT-Invest is building four 355 megawatt facilities in the Moscow Region and one in the city of Kazan that are to start power supplies on December 1, 2022. In February 2021, an RT-Invest representative said that the company may delay the launches until the end of 2023 due to the problems with equipment supplies during the pandemic.

An RT-Invest representative told Kommersant that the launch deadlines were delayed to the third and fourth quarters of 2023, and that the company was ramping up construction to catch up.

But the Energy Ministry said in a document sent by Minister Nikolai Shulginov to the government that it wants RT-Invest to prove the force majeure factor first. The Chamber of Industry and Commerce has to confirm the fact, after which the company should submit a request for the delay to the supervisory board of market regulator Sovet Rynka, the business daily said.

A representative of Deputy Prime Minister Viktoriya Abramchenko said that the government had received the company’s proposals and would analyze them later. A Natural Resources and Environment Ministry representative said that the issue was for the Energy Ministry to solve.

 (74.7680 rubles – U.S. $1)

End %%md/jst%%