Litgrid representative: Astrava’s electricity will flow physically to deficit Baltic countries

“From a technical point of view, it is very natural that the Baltic countries are in deficit countries, and with the emergence of a large source of generation near our border, physically in fact; I emphasize, physically, not commercially, the electricity will flow towards deficit areas. We cannot change the laws of physics, “Giedrius Radvila, director of Litgrid’s Systems Management Department, told reporters on Tuesday.

“A large source of generation near Lithuania will significantly affect physical flows,” he added.

The State Energy Regulatory Authority (VERT) has expressed concern that according to the new tripartite trading methodology developed with third countries, the flow of Russian electricity in Lithuania would even increase.

However, Energy Minister Žygimantas Vaičiūnas asked why VERT had recently expressed these fears.

“VERT has been involved in the process with the European Commission, the Baltic transmission operators since the beginning of the year. Formally, the latest versions of the methodology were already presented in September, but those figures and coefficients were the best known. This is probably an open question to assess why only at this time VERT performed such calculations, ”said Ž. Vaičiūnas.

The Lithuanian regulator has not yet approved the new methodology, as its draft does not guarantee that Belarusian electricity will not enter the Lithuanian market, so it needs to be improved. At that time, Latvia and Estonia approved the methodology last week.

According to VERT, when calculating returns from trade with Russia, the physical flow from Russia through the connections between Latvia and Estonia should be taken into account, but the physical connection between Lithuania and Belarus should not be included.

The possibility of Astrava’s electricity entering the common market through the Latvian-Russian connection and the use of lines between Lithuania and Belarus is the most controversial.

The maximum capacity of the connection between Lithuania and Belarus now reaches 1,300 megawatts (MW), and that of Latvia-Russia – 900 MW, but if the tripartite methodology is approved and an additional coefficient of 0.62 is applied according to it, its capacity would decrease to about 600 MW.

Litgrid announced on Tuesday that Belarus had started generating electricity at the Astrava nuclear power plant. Immediately after that, Lithuania established a zero capacity for commercial electricity flow from Belarus.