Bulgaria’s caretaker Cabinet to table energy sector amendments
Bulgaria’s caretaker Cabinet will table a bill of amendments to the country’s energy sector laws in Parliament, caretaker Prime Minister Marin Raykov said in Parliament on May 22.
The bill will be tabled before the caretaker government leaves office, which is expected to happen in the coming weeks.
The amendments envision a fixed fee for electricity transit (as opposed to the flexible scale used now, where the fee depends on the amounts shipped) and also requiring companies on the liberalised electricity market to buy the more expensive electricity from renewable energy producers.
The first measure is expected to make it easier for Bulgarian producers to export electricity – reduced domestic consumption has recently forced grid operator ESO to impose power generation limitations to prevent grid overload – and the latter is expected to reduce the upward pressure on household electricity prices by re-directing at least part of the green energy to the liberalised market.
Raykov said that his Cabinet took office at a time when Bulgaria’s energy system faced bankruptcy because of faulty price calculation formulas, with the regulator mistakenly estimating the amounts of electricity produced from renewable sources well below the actual production.
“We found a legislative base that did not comply with European directives and required [state electricity utility] NEK to buy electricity from producers that were supposed to be generating it in a highly efficient way, but that was not the case,” Raykov said.
“I think that in two months we have done everything possible to get under control the problems in the system, caused also by the over-production of electricity,” he said.
(Caretaker Prime Minister Marin Raykov. Photo: government.bg)
