Disruption management plan’s ‘complex nature’ delaying start

The Production Reconstruction, Environment and Energy Ministry is not yet ready to make a final decision for the implementation of a “power disruption management” plan, despite the fundamental role it would play in reducing energy costs for Greek industry.

The measure’s introduction would also offset the consequences for industry of a demand by the country’s lenders for an end to a 20 percent electricity discount offered to industrial consumers by PPC, the main power utility.

Commenting on the issue during a press conference in Athens yesterday, staged to announce revised and more favorable payback terms for overdue electricity bill amounts owed by consumers to PPC, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the energy minister, noted that reconstructing the Greek economy’s production model stands as a major challenge, but admitted he was not yet ready to launch the “power disruption management” plan.

It will enable energy cost savings for major-scale industry in exchange for shifting energy usage to off-peak hours whenever required by IPTO, the power grid operator.

“This is a complex issue involving many factors. It concerns us, but I don’t have a time schedule for when we will be ready,” the minister remarked.

The crucial matter holding back the “power disruption management” plan’s introduction concerns how its cost, estimated at between 50 million and 60 million euros annually, will be covered. A plan that had been prepared by the country’s previous administration and endorsed by the European Commission threw all the weight on renewable energy source (RES) producers.

According to energypress sources, a new proposal submitted to the European Commission by Yannis Tolios, General Secretary of Industry, includes two options.

The first of these entails implementing the old plan that had been submitted by the previous government and accepted by the EU’s executive body, as it stands, whenever RAE, the Regulatory Authority for Energy, is technically prepared to support it. This would cost photovoltaic producers 3.6 percent of their total revenue and wind-energy producers 1.8 percent of their revenues.

The other alternative submitted to the European Commission by Tolios, the industry authority, concerns implementing the plan in the immediate future with funding revisions that would decrease the burden on the RES sector.

A third option, proposed by certain RES sector authorities, entails delaying the plan’s implementation until 2016. This could allow the plan to be entirely financed by funds raised from emission tariff auctions which, by 2016, will no longer be injected into the RES special account maintained by LAGIE, the Electricity Market Operator.