Valentin Mezhevich, First Vice Chairman of the Commission on Natural Monopolies of the Federation Council of Russia

— Russia needs to build new reactors and to develop network economy

Already today Russia is facing the prerequisites of energy crisis and serious lack of electricity in its actively developing industrial regions. Our power engineers are facing the serious task of ensuring fuel-energy balance and carrying out effective price policy on all types of fuel. In Russia over 50% electricity is produced by gas power plants. This imbalance is due to low gas prices. Meanwhile, the world practice suggests that 20%-25% of electricity be produced by coal power plants, 20%-25% by nuclear power plants, 20%-25% by water power plants and only the rest by gas power plants.

Of course, it would not be bad if at least 5% of electricity was produced by alternative power plants: wind, bio-fuel, etc. Energy balance can be ensured by effective energy capacity distribution. This is the problem of the Energy Strategy that already needs revision. I believe that it is necessary to built new units at NPPs. Only then will we get a real chance to ensure balance in our energy sector. One more urgent task is to start a large-scale network construction. The investment program of the Federal Network Company is aimed exactly at solving this task. The funds the FNC UES will get as a result of bringing the state share in its authorized capital to 75% will also be spent on network construction and consequent overcoming of electricity shortages. 

I would like to note that the NPPs operated by Rosenergoatom have a serious potential for increasing their capacity and it can well be brought up to the European level. At the same time, I would like to point out that, if we want to use all the capacities of the nuclear power industry, we should actively develop mobile capacities that can help us to overcome electricity consumption peaks.

The development of mobile capacities will certainly raise NPP efficiency.