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Czeslaw Mrall:
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/84ebd4c6-f05e-11df-88db-0014...
This article from a special six-page supplement on Poland in today's FT. /m
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Power: Coal-fired source of a looming dark age
By Adam Easton in Warsaw
Financial Times, 17 November 2010
Poland’s ageing coal-dependent power industry is facing its biggest challenge in years – replacing obsolete plants while foreign investors are abandoning plans to build new capacity in the country.
Seventy per cent of the country’s power plants and transmission lines are more than 30 years old and must soon be rebuilt at an estimated cost of €50bn ($68bn).
Most of those plants are fuelled by heavily-polluting coal. Poland is the European Union’s largest hard coal producer and around 95 per cent of the country’s electricity is produced from both hard coal and lignite.
Polish and foreign generators have announced plans to build 26.4GW of capacity but much of this will never be built. Just two new units, with combined capacity of less than 1GW, have been connected to the national grid in the past three years. Difficulties in raising financing for new projects and the unclear cost of complying with future climate change regulations have led foreign investors in the Polish market to reconsider their plans. Vattenfall, the Scandinavian utility, has dropped two large coal-fired investments and is reviewing its presence in the country. Germany’s RWE and CEZ of the Czech Republic have also dropped plans for new plants. Analysts say the cost of carbon alone already adds between 20-25 per cent to Polish wholesale electricity prices and after 2013, no one yet knows how much it will increase.
Krzysztof Rozen, head of corporate finance at KPMG Poland, reckons 60 per cent of the country’s installed power generation capacity will be obsolete by 2016.
“There is a huge need to replace this and in Poland right now we don’t have the investment in place to do it. On the other hand our capacity to import electricity from abroad is also limited, so a blackout, unless something dramatically changes in the next couple of years, is looming over Poland in five years’ time,” he says.
The global financial crisis helped Poland in its precarious position by cutting power demand by 4 per cent last year. In comparison, so far this year, electricity consumption has risen 4.6 per cent. Wladyslaw Mielczarski, a leading power sector expert from Lodz Technical University, says if annual gross domestic product continues to grow by a conservative 3 per cent for the next five years, Poland will suffer electricity shortages by 2017-18.
“If the government continues to do very little we will have some kind of catastrophe in the next five years,” he says.
Mr Mielczarski says the government would probably have to introduce controlled rolling blackouts with industries forced to reduce production, as happened during supply crises in communist times. He said the government should offer investors incentives to build new plants, something that is possible under EU directives.
Foreign investors may be shying away from coal projects in Poland, but that is not the case with the country’s four vertically-integrated state-controlled power companies. The largest, Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE), will soon connect a new lignite-fired unit at the giant Elektrownia Belchatow plant, which produces almost 20 per cent of the country’s electricity. PGE is also tendering for new coal units at two of its other plants.
The Polish government recognises the country’s plants cannot keep burning so much coal. The government’s energy policy for the next 20 years plans to reduce dependency on the fuel by around 40 per cent, partly through the construction of the country’s first two nuclear power plants.
“I think we have to change fuel and if we are pushed by the EU we will do it slowly, we cannot do it overnight. The only way we can significantly reduce our dependence on coal in the next 10 years is through gas,” says Mr Mielczarski.
Poland produces its own natural gas but it relies on Russian imports for two- thirds of its needs, making gas, which is about 50 per cent cleaner than coal, much less politically acceptable as a fuel. The government has signed a gas deal with Russia to secure supplies until 2022 but it is also pinning its hopes on the country’s – as yet unproven – reserves of shale gas.
Over the past three years oil majors such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron have bought shale gas exploration licences in Poland.
The investors are optimistic and Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister, has even talked of Poland becoming a new Norway. But no one knows how much shale gas is under Polish soil or that it will prove commercially viable.
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