President of Ukraine’s national nuclear energy generating company Energoatom Yuriy Nedashkovsky forecasts that a tender to select an international partner company under the Ukraine-EU Energy Bridge project is expected to be called in January or February 2018.
“Today, documents are being prepared for the announcement of the tender. We expect that this work will be completed jointly with the Energy Ministry, the Ministry of Finance, and the Economic Development Ministry by the end of this year. So, an international competition will be announced early next year, perhaps it will be in late January or early February,” he said at a meeting with a delegation of the Polish Foreign Ministry on November 20. The winner will be named six weeks after the launch of the tender, he said.
He also noted that a project earlier proposed by a consortium of companies, namely Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB (Sweden), Polenergia International S.ar.l. (Luxembourg) and EDF Trading Limited (the United Kingdom) will be used as a benchmark for the evaluation of other bids. As UNIAN reported, Energoatom had earlier presented its Ukraine-EU Energy Bridge project for linking unit No. 2 at Khmelnytsky nuclear power plant (KhNPP) with ENTSO-E (the European Network of Transmission System Operators) and exporting electricity.
Electricity supplies to Europe under long-term contracts might allow raising investment in the completion of power units Nos. 3 and 4 at KhNPP whose readiness is assessed at 73% and 28%, respectively. According to Nedashkovsky, Energoatom plans to start electricity exports to the EU and complete the said units at KhNPP in late 2020 and early 2021. It became known in early September that a consortium of three leading European energy companies – Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB (Sweden), Polenergia International S.ar.l. (Luxembourg) and EDF Trading Limited (the United Kingdom) – was planning to participate in the implementation of the Ukraine-EU Energy Bridge project.
