Angelin Tsachev: The construction of new PAVETS can cost BGN 1-1.2 billion

The removal of NEC as a public supplier is a requirement of the European Commission. The executive director of the Electricity System Operator, Angelin Tsachev, recalled this to BNT. He commented on the President's veto of the Energy Act, which included the removal of NEC as a marketer. "Removing NEK as a public supplier is one of the requirements of the EC in the reform related to the liberalization of the wholesale market. What this reform is - all electricity producers must be placed under the same market conditions. That is, no there should be determination of quotas by EWRC, which would place certain producers in more preferential conditions than others, there should not be mandatory buy-out, etc. All these reforms are related to the implementation of an EC regulation since 2018. Tsachev explained.

According to him, the plants in the "Maritsa East" complex are not in danger, because their production is not limited, as long as they have a sufficiently good market price.

According to Angelin Tsachev, at this stage our country has enough electricity for the needs of Bulgarian consumers. He recalled that our country is part of the common European energy market of continental Europe and we can count on electricity imports from the entire continent. Our country has a well-developed transmission network with a large cross-border capacity, which enables energy traders to supply sufficient amounts of electricity," Tsachev believes.

New RES projects remain a challenge. It is the multitude of small producers of renewable energy that create a problem in the very operation of the electricity supply system. The reason is that RES has a non-permanent nature of operation. For us, the best are the capacities that are available 24 hours a day," said Tsachev, referring to the basic power plants.

"The moment the sun sets, within 45 minutes to 1 hour balancing capacities must be activated in the system to overcome the failure of the RES with solar energy and to replace them with other capacities. It is currently balancing with hydropower plants and thermal power plants," said Tsachev. Namely, at this hour, about 500 MW of power "disappears" from the system, simply because the sun has set, other experts recall.

According to Tsachev, coal-fired power plants will limit their production in the future due to market reasons and the high prices of carbon emission allowances. "There are a lot of requests to build gas plants in the country. It also relies on building storage systems, which includes new hydro plants or expensive investments in battery farms.

The construction of such plants costs between 1 and 1.2 million BGN for one megawatt of power. Two such projects of Batak Dam and Dospat Dam, managed by NEK, are currently under discussion. These PAVETS will be underground and with a planned capacity of 800-1000 megawatt hours. That is, they will also have the opportunity to store 30,000 - 50,000 megawatt hours of energy, the expert also calculated.

Thus, the rough estimate shows that a similar plant would cost around BGN 1-1.2 billion. European funding can be used for the implementation of the projects, the ESO director also believes.

In his interview, Tsachev also recalled how important the restoration of the PAVETS Chair is for the system.

According to him, the forecasts for reducing electricity consumption in the future do not include the mass introduction of electric cars, which by 2050 should be 3.5 million units in our country. "In the scenarios approved by the energy transition commission, it is said that the consumption of electrical energy in the country for this period will be between 62-65 million megawatt hours, which is approximately twice as much as now," explained Tsachev.

However, one should not forget how important energy efficiency measures are and their improvement over time.