From the last week of September until now, the import of electricity fell to minimal levels, and at the beginning of October we had several days in which we also exported electricity.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, boasted about this in his address to the public last weekend.
“For 10 days we have not imported a single megawatt of electricity, for 10 days we managed to consolidate the entire system with the support of our Norwegian friends who help us with advice and work together with us to stabilize the situation,” he said, adding that the storage in Banatski dvor is full and that we are currently not consuming any gas reserves, regardless of the fact that we have included the gas power plants TE-TO Novi Sad and TE-TO Zrenjanin.
“We are doing this because we have enough gas at the moment, and thus we are saving the coal we need and we are not straining ourselves to the limit,” said Vučić.
Did Norwegians contribute to this current stabilization of the power system, as we learned in the previous days – under the label strictly confidential or some more banal reasons?
According to experts, the current weather conditions are extremely favorable, and in those conditions, EPS’s production is sufficient to cover consumption.
Željko Marković, an energy expert from the Deloitte consulting firm, points to the low consumption and use of gas power plants.
“We are in a period when the temperature is low enough that cooling is not needed, and high enough that heating has not started yet.” Electricity consumption is low, so domestic production is sufficient to cover consumption.
In addition, thermal power plants use about three gigawatts of installed power, and about 200 megawatts are produced from gas in TE-TO Novi Sad and Zrenjanin. With the power plant in Sremska Mitrovica, up to 300 megawatts can be extracted from gas power plants”, explains Marković, adding that the production of electricity from coal is still limited to around 2.8 gigawatts.
The favorable circumstances can also be attributed to the recovery of hydrology, since the inflows on the Danube rose to 5,000 cubic meters per second, although a drop in hydrology is expected again.
“We hope that the hydrology will be improved in the winter, and in addition, what the temperatures will be in the winter, the most depends on how much electricity we will import”, explains Marković.
How much warm weather in October helps the energy sector is also shown by the fact that in recent days, more than 200 megawatts of electricity have been generated in thermal power plants (TE-TO) using gas, even though gas is considered the most expensive energy source.
Considering that we get about two-thirds of the gas at a lower price than the market price based on the contract with Russia, according to Marković’s calculation, a megawatt hour of electricity obtained in this way costs 90 to 100 euros, which is cheaper than the market price of electricity of 200 or 300 euros per megawatt hour.
This is possible because the gas is currently not being used for heating due to the warm weather, so it can be diverted to generate electricity.
In the previous two weeks, the consumption rarely exceeded four gigawatts, and according to Nenad Jovanović, energy expert, domestic production is able to provide up to five gigawatts.
“Lower temperature also means lower consumption. At the end of the heating season, we have a temperature of 25 degrees, Danas writes.
