Is there any boiling water?

Geothermal energy is not popular in Kamchatka

In the Kamchatka region, where, perhaps, like nowhere else in Russia, the development of geothermal energy is promising, an enterprise that has a monopoly on the development and use of numerous geothermal water deposits has fallen under bankruptcy proceedings.

The state enterprise Kamchatburgeothermiya was declared bankrupt at the request of the regional tax service, and although the case is being considered by the cassation court, the debt is more than 60 million rubles. does not give the company's management any hope for a way out of the crisis. General Director of Kamchatburgeothermy Mikhail Krasnoperov blames the regional and district authorities for everything. As he told Vremya Novostei, it was precisely because of their unique approach to geothermal energy that the enterprise found itself in a hopeless situation.

This year, the large resort village of Paratunka in the suburbs of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was completely switched to heating using underground boiling water. According to the head of the settlement, Evgeniy Belov, after calculations were made, it was decided to close coal-fired boiler houses, since the purchase of fuel (which in Kamchatka is twice as expensive as on the mainland), wages for stokers and the cost of repairing boilers cost the rural budget about 8 million rub. per year. The cost of heating residential buildings from geothermal sources is 3 million rubles.

However, the current management scheme in housing and communal services did not allow villagers to save money and reduce heating bills, which was promised. Tariffs for housing and communal services remained the same, since, as it turned out, people do not have the right to pay amounts less than those approved by the regional energy commission. The mechanism of financial settlements at a higher level is also strange. Today in Kamchatka there is a centralized system for purchasing fuel before the start of the heating season: it is purchased using funds from the regional budget, and then money is withdrawn from each settlement to cover these costs. From the Paratunka budget, according to a peculiar, as Mr. Belov put it, decision of the district meeting of deputies, an amount equal to the cost of purchasing coal and fuel oil went to the region. And it was this money, according to him, that the village planned to pay to Kamchatburgeothermy for transferring the village to underground heat supply.

The prosecutor's office has already taken up matters of geothermal energy. According to the prosecutor of the Elizovsky district of Kamchatka, Alexander Ageev, last year the regional budget transferred about 3 million rubles to the budget of the Elizovsky district for the needs of the Kamchatburgeothermia enterprise. However, this money never reached the company.

One of the first developers of Kamchatka geothermal water deposits, Candidate of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences Yuri Manukhin, is confident that a serious struggle has now broken out on the peninsula between supporters of unconventional energy and numerous structures that ensure the delivery of fuel to the peninsula. It comes to the point that in the Elizovo region they refuse to buy cheaper electricity from the Mutnovskaya geothermal station in favor of more expensive electricity produced at several thermal power plants in the city of Petropavlovsk using imported fuel oil.

As Mr. Manukhin noted, the reserves of thermal waters of the Paratunka Valley alone are enough to heat the apartments of the entire city of Elizovo (the second largest city in Kamchatka) and nearby villages. However, the implementation of this project is artificially hampered, he says.

In the meantime, the head of Paratunka, Evgeny Belov, ordered a year's supply of coal to be delivered to the already closed boiler room.

Ilya SERGEEV, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky