Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the Government to return to the consideration of the megaproject of the construction of the HPP in the Far East, which was discussed in the Soviet years. This is stated in the list of instructions following the meeting on August 6 on the situation with floods and fires, to which the “Vedomosti” refer.
It is about the construction of four stations in the Amur basin, including the rivers Niman and Selemja. The report on this issue must be submitted by October 1. Representative of the Ministry of Energy confirmed that the commission is in working out.
A representative of RusHydro said that the company is preparing a proposal to build HPPs, taking into account the protection of settlements from flooding and regulation of wastewater in the difts of the Amur. Possible project parameters It did not specify.
Penteen after the occurrence of the idea of the construction of the hydropower station in the region, only the Zeyskaya, Bureysky and Nizhne-Buri station were brought to the end. In 2013, immediately after record flooding in the Far East, the discussion about the new hydropower plants was resumed. However, then they were supposed to have a significant participation of Chinese investors.
According to the project “RusHydro” from 2014, four stations were to build a Russian-Chinese enterprise, where the ratio of ownership would be 51 and 49 percent. About 70 percent of financing were assumed to involve from Russian and Chinese financial institutions, and the participant from the Chinese side – Shina Three Gorges Corporation (CTGC) – was to be responsible for long-term contracts for sale. That is, energy was supposed to supply China.
However, in September 2016, CTGC has refused to refuse the project, after which the discussions stopped. In July 2019, Alexander Novak, at that time, the Minister of Energy, assessed the project of 400 billion rubles. At the same time, he recognized that the fully problem of floods could not be solved, since the bulk of the water in Cupid comes from the territory of China.
Senior Analyst of the Energy Center of the Moscow School of Management “Skolkovo” Yuri Melnikov noted that excessive energy remains the main problem of new hydropower plants in the Far East. There is no demand for it in the region, and to build expensive stations for the sake of possible sale of energy to other countries looks dubious practice. According to him, for the same money with floods it would be possible to deal with much more efficiently.
Analyst Sova Capital Matvey Takes agrees that it is possible to build a hydropower station only in the case of long-term contracts, where China would take over the obligations to buy electricity, without it the station will not pay off.
Earlier it was reported that in connection with the abnormal heat in a number of regions of China, it began to turn off electricity, as well as increase the use of coal for its production.