Chisinau officials explain interruption of power supplies from Cuchurgan to Romania

There are no politic reasons that could determine the interruption of the power supply from the Cuchurgan power plant to Romania, Moldova's Deputy Prime Minister Valeriu Lazar told the reporters. “The suspension of the power supplies was based neither on political nor technological reasons. The interruption resulted from the evolution of prices on the regional market. The Romanian electric power distributors that purchased electricity from Cuchurgan until present consider that there are better offers,” Valeriu Lazar said, quoted by Info-Prim Neo. The minister does not exclude that the supplies could be resumed during the cold period of the year. “The decision will be made neither by the Governments of Moldova and Romania nor by the authorities of the breakaway republic of Transnistria, but by Russia's Inter RAO UES, which owns the power plant, and by the Romanian companies that import power. This is a matter of contractual relations. The administrative interventions are excluded,” Valeriu Lazar said. Vadim Ceban, the director general of the National Agency for Energy Regulation (ANRE), said that Inter RAO UES informed the Agency that the power supplies to Romania will be suspended by the end of this year. “According to the presented information, the Romanian partners of Inter RAO UES reconsidered their decision to buy electricity from Cuchurgan as the power consumption in Romanian decreased during the crisis. The prices of the power produced in Romania also declined. Earlier, they were higher than those offered by Cuchurgan,” Ceban said, adding that the Cuchurgan power plant supplied only 12-14 million kWh of power to Romania. He also said that Moldova purchases 80% of the necessary power from Cuchurgan, while the rest from local cogeneration units and from Ukraine.