The President of the Fiscal Council Pavle Petrovic said that it has been reporting about the terrible state in state-owned power utility EPS since 2019, but the recent incident at TPP Nikola Tesla was even beyond the scope of their warnings.
Petrovic said that the analysis from late 2019 shown that the quality of coal used by EPS was going down and that this should be taken into consideration when preparing the strategy of operations in line with the requirements of the EU in switching to non-fossil sources of electricity. The Council determined that the investments in EPS are insufficient and that they are at the level of amortization, in some cases even below that level.
The Fiscal Council warned that EPS is at a turning point and that a decisive change was needed in the company’s operations, as well as an urgent launching of a new, large investment cycle of 5 to 6 billion euros.
Until the beginning of the 1990s, Serbia had a well set-up electrical energy system and EPS had a great surplus of production capacities relative to the country’s requirements at the time. That surplus has enabled it to respond to the growth of domestic consumption in the past thirty years, without major problems, even though in that period it has not invested enough money even to preserve the existing production capacities.
