Serbian state-owned power utility EPS recorded a net loss in the amount of 678 million euros in the first nine months of 2022, compared to a profit of some 72 million euros in the same period last year .
The company’s revenues increased by 19.4 % in the first nine months of the year, reaching a total of 2.21 billion euros, but its expenditures rose by 60.7 % in the same period to 2.72 billion euros.
In the first nine months of 2022, EPS produced a total of 25.5 TWh of electricity, which is 12 % less compared to the same period in 2021. Hydropower plants generated 6.7 TWh of electricity, while the generation of coal-fired power plants amounted to 15.8 TWh.
EPS recorded a loss of 418 million euros in the first half of 2022. The main reason for such huge losses is decreased electricity generation and subsequent imports at extremely high prices. EPS also started importing coal, mostly from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, for which it spent around 9.5 million euros in the first half of 2022. However, by far most costly item is imported electricity – in H1 2022 EPS imported 2,356 GWh of electricity at the average price of 222 euros/MWh, which amounts to more than 520 million euros. The loss due to bad management and untimely mining of coal is measured not only by the cost of importing expensive electricity due to the lack of own production, but also by the lost profit that it would have had if it had exported electricity at such high prices on the foreign markets.
