| Anatoly Chubais is ready to amend the electricity reform plan RAO UES of Russia has completed an investigation into the causes that led to the power accident on May 25 in the Moscow region. Anatoly Chubais, speaking yesterday at the annual conference of Renaissance Capital, said that the main result of this investigation will be an adjustment to the reform of the electric power industry. At the same time, he clarified: it is an adjustment, but not a stop or a refusal to transform. This statement was made against the backdrop of an unprecedented attack by the Moscow mayor's office on the State Duma working commission, which, according to Yuri Luzhkov, is trying to whitewash energy workers and underestimate the amount of damage from the blackout.
The most important step, designed to prevent a recurrence of the accident, based on the words of Mr. Chubais, will be a revision of the criteria for classifying networks (primarily with a voltage of 110 kV - this is the voltage at which the Chagino substation operates) into the Federal Grid Company (FGC). In other words, RAO intends to shift this responsibility to the state represented by the government. Although many experts have long criticized this idea, it now seems that it will still be approved.
The head of RAO yesterday chose not to go into the causes of the accident, indicating that he would talk about it in detail next Friday at a meeting of the company's board of directors. However, even the words he said yesterday coincided with the statements of the head of another commission to investigate the causes of the accident - formed by State Duma deputies headed by Vice-Speaker Vladimir Pekhtin. Mr. Chubais said the accident did not start at the Chagino substation, although the fire at that substation “was a prerequisite” for the crisis to spread. Mr. Pekhtin said the same thing last week, however, he added that, according to his information, the tree that shorted the wires at the substation in Ochakovo was to blame for everything, but in general, “we must understand that there was a combination of shortcomings here, and not just a surge on the line, that is, a short circuit due to a fallen tree.”
Similar positions of Anatoly Chubais and the Pekhtin commission aroused the indignation of the Moscow authorities. “It is with regret that we have to state that the working group, headed by Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Vladimir Pekhtin, from the very beginning, instead of an objective investigation of what happened, set a course for the “rehabilitation” of RAO UES,” the mayor’s press service said in a statement released yesterday. The Moscow government is outraged the fact that the working group reduced the amount of damage from 1.7 billion rubles to an amount “in the range from 600 million to 1.2 billion rubles.” According to the city authorities, “the main task of the deputies was an attempt to protect the cash register of RAO UES of Russia.” from the encroachments of the affected Muscovites."
Mr. Chubais did not comment on Luzhkov’s invective, and Mr. Pekhtin issued a response statement, the meaning of which is that “before the final publication of the results of the work of the Duma commission, all evaluative comments on its activities are inappropriate.” Data on damage, writes the vice speaker of the State Duma, are based on materials from accident investigation commissions from other departments.
In any case, it is significant that Mosenergo and other electric power companies in the capital have almost no money for the renovation of equipment, and due to the upcoming compensation for damage (whatever it may be), they will have even less. However, Anatoly Chubais promises to implement “individual projects” in Moscow in a very short time - technical re-equipment of “everything related to dispatching”, as well as modernization of 110 kV substations - “the weakest link” in the electric power industry. He kept silent about what funds these projects will be implemented with.
However, from the speech to investors it followed that RAO intends to reduce its international activities in favor of domestic Russian ones. The energy holding's activities outside Russia, however, are not large-scale with the exception of two projects - the recent purchase of two power plants in Bulgaria for more than $700 million, as well as plans to build hydroelectric power plants in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But, as Mr. Chubais clarified, the Bulgarian RAO project will not be abandoned, and the Kyrgyz and Tajik ones are, by and large, still in development. So it is quite possible that funds will be found through the redistribution of cash flows.
In addition, according to the head of RAO, the government is ready to support changes in the structure of the network and dispatch components of the electric power industry. According to the industry reform program, they should be 75% controlled by the state. Now FSK and System Operator are 100% subsidiaries of RAO. As Mr. Chubais says, it is planned to speed up the process of separating them from RAO in order to create a single management vertical.
Also, according to him, the government is not against increasing FSK's assets through low-voltage networks (110 kV and below). According to the current reform plan, these networks should become part of interregional network companies, the fate of which has not yet been determined. However, the President of the Energy Policy Institute, Vladimir Milov, believes that FSK is unlikely to be able to pay enough attention to these networks, because they must take into account regional characteristics, which is problematic to do from the center. “And in general, if FSK is now concerned with low-voltage networks with all their problems, it will not have enough strength to develop backbone networks,” Mr. Milov is sure. And former Deputy Minister of Energy Viktor Kudryavy believes that such a design will be even more clumsy than today’s: “In large cities, networks with voltages of 110 kV, 220 kV and sometimes even 500 kV have actually become distribution networks; they operate on intra-city flows,” he says . - If you transfer their management to the highest level, the competence of this management will be lost. In addition, many people forget that in large cities there are a lot of thermal power plants, for which heat generation is a priority in winter. If networks begin to be managed from the center, who will then make decisions on the heat load of a particular station? How will this compare to electricity generation if another organization does it? Who will take into account the need to load nuclear power plants?”
However, Anatoly Chubais said yesterday that he is ready to adjust the work of RAO management towards technical safety. Among the criteria for personal assessment of the performance of each manager, indicators related to reliability will prevail, he said. The institute of chief engineers will be significantly strengthened, Mr. Chubais promised, and these specialists will definitely have access to the energy company’s budgetary funds, and the level of their responsibility will be significantly increased. In general, based on the results of the analysis of the accident, the head of RAO promised, each culprit will be held accountable depending on the degree of guilt, “but this is not the main thing, the main thing is what to do, and not who is to blame,” Mr. Chubais noted.
RAO already knows what to do. But who will do this - develop technical regulations, modernize equipment, etc. - is still unclear. And if this uncertainty drags on, as the entire energy reform has dragged on, we can again expect outdated parts to fail at multiple substations. After all, in Moscow alone, according to the same Anatoly Chubais, 122 transformers from 1958 continue to operate. Exactly the same ones worked until recently at the Chagino substation. Nikolay GORELOV |
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