Polish Briefing: Enea to only invest in green sources. Coal gasification less and less realistic

What goes on in Poland on the 29th of March.

Enea to only invest in green sources. Coal gasification less and less realistic

Currently Enea has over 400 MW of installed capacity in RES. The company wants to increase it, and the new strategy of the Group – as President Paweł Szczeszek said – is to respond to the new market requirements. Enea Nowa Energia, established within the Group, currently manages 26 installations. In order to increase this potential, the company intends to acquire more renewable energy sources. “We are planning to grow our investments in photovoltaic farms on leased land. The amount paid for the leased land for solar farms will depend on the size of the land and other factors. This real estate will be located outside of areas covered by nature protection regulations, outside the floodplain, and will be 2 – 100 hectares large,” he said.

In February 2020, Enea and Mitsubishi Hitashi Power System received the consent of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection to establish a joint venture for the construction of a gas and steam coal unit with an integrated coal gasification cycle. “We want to invest in technologies, primarily zero-emission technologies. The regulatory and market environment is very dynamic, and the implementation of energy projects also depends on the attitude of financial institutions. However, we are constantly analyzing the project based on this technology, taking into account the above-mentioned factors,” the president answered in response to a question about the state of work on this project.

Enea is no longer a partner in the Ostrołęka Power Plant project, however, when the company was still an investor in the coal project, last year, after stopping work on the construction of this unit, it made impairment losses to the tune of PLN 500 million. At the December meeting of the energy and state treasury commission, one of Enea’s representatives said that the project cost PLN 1.3 billion. At the conference, Enea emphasized that it was too early to answer the question about costs. In the second quarter of this year the entire costs of the project will be calculated, and that’s when we will learn the answer to the question whether it will be possible to partially reverse the losses.