The administration of IPTO, Greece’s power grid operator, has scheduled to visit Beijing next week to present to the leaders of State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the operator’s strategic partner, IPTO’s latest and yet-to-be-released financial results as well as a business growth plan. SGCC acquired a 24 percent stake in IPTO last year.

According to sources, IPTO’s results, to be released within the next few days, will be better than expected, a prospect that will surely please the operator’s Chinese partner.

Meanwhile, the operator is waiting for a decision, any day now, from RAE, the Regulatory Authority for Energy, on new tariffs, to apply for a four-year period.

IPTO is bolstering its position through the development of new interconnections, planned to follow the first phase of the Cyclades interconnection.

The second phase of the Cyclades interconnection with the mainland is expected to be completed in early 2019. A third phase is planned to be completed by the end of 2020, while a fourth phase is set to be added to the operator’s ten-year business plan covering 2019 to 2028.

An international tender for the first phase of the Cretan interconnection, a small-scale connection to link Crete and the Peloponnese, is expected to be announced within the next few days. Talks with the EuroAsia consortium for the establishment of a partnership for development of the second phase of the Cretan interconnection, to link Athens with Crete, are in progress.

The Cretan interconnection is planned to be incorporated into the prospective EuroAsia project, which will link the Greek, Cypriot and Israeli grids.