...And five children's stadiums

Gazprom will gasify St. Petersburg

The governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko, signed a cooperation agreement yesterday with the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller. Next year the concern will invest over 10 billion rubles. to St. Petersburg boiler houses, pipelines, heating networks and stadiums. However, the main issue has not yet been resolved - the supply of gas to the North-West Thermal Power Plant, the downtime of the second unit of which, as Anatoly Chubais recently stated, will lead to the need to “limit consumers.”

Every year at the end of December, Smolny and the management of Gazprom sign an agreement, the main thing of which is the gasification of the St. Petersburg suburbs (where in some houses the stoves are heated with wood), the construction of new boiler houses to replace those that appeared in the middle of the last century, as well as an increase in gas supplies to a city that receives heat from gas-fired thermal power plants. Ms. Matvienko said yesterday with pleasure that she had obtained from Gazprom a doubling of the funding for the program for the reconstruction of heating systems in three districts of St. Petersburg, which will receive a total of 5.4 billion rubles. In addition, 1.3 billion rubles. the monopoly will allocate for the construction of gas pipelines to the villages of the Kurortny district located along the shore of the Gulf of Finland. About 3.3 billion more will be invested in the highway to the island of Kronstadt, as well as, first of all, the highway to the South-Western Thermal Power Plant (this power plant is being built by the Sintez development group, which has long dreamed of attracting Gazprom as a partner). City officials claim that the monopoly has almost agreed to buy a stake in this station, independent of RAO UES, but Mr. Miller yesterday expressed himself extremely vaguely on this matter: “Yugo-Zapadnaya CHPP is part of our cooperation program.” He added that a decision could be expected by the end of 2008, although he did not specify whether it would be a purchase of a share in the project. Finally, the concern promised to build five children's stadiums in 2008; one of these facilities recently appeared at the school where the head of the board of directors of the monopoly and presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev studied.

The North-Western Thermal Power Plant does not yet have bright prospects: only the first unit with a capacity of 450 MW is operating, and the second unit of the same capacity is idle due to lack of gas. The thermal power plant, which is owned by RAO UES, and Gazprom is a minority shareholder, is not even included in the gas pipeline design program for 2008 - after the New Year, the monopoly will design routes to the thermal power plant on Vasilyevsky Island and the second and third stages of the pipeline to Yugo-Zapadnaya CHP. “These problems arose not through the fault of Gazprom, we are quickly solving them, Gazprom will speed up the work as much as possible,” is all that Mr. Miller said regarding the provision of gas to the North-Western Thermal Power Plant. The head of RAO Anatoly Chubais a few days ago in St. Petersburg recommended that all questions about the route to this ill-fated station be forwarded to “an organization that deals with gas and is called Gazprom.” And he added that “the second unit is in urgent demand, refusal threatens to limit consumers.” The head of RAO can be understood - the thermal power plant has extensive opportunities for exporting electricity to Finland, and while the unit is idle, RAO incurs losses. However, Gazprom can also be understood in this situation: as we know, it is not going to compete with RAO in Finland, and therefore would like to gain control over the station, but can come to an agreement with the energy holding.

Ivan GORDEEV