Russia backs Kyoto climate treaty
news.bbc.co.uk
Putin backs Kyoto - but his top economic aide opposes it
The Russian government has approved the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and sent it to parliament to be ratified.
Until now, Moscow has wavered over the treaty, which cannot come into force without Russian ratification.
From Investors Hub CWEI board post - emphasis by me:
Chinese to rescue Russian coal-fired power expansion
SIMON SHUSTER AND JACQUELINE COWHIG
Reuters
May 5, 2008 at 7:52 AM EDT
MOSCOW/LONDON — Chinese engineers are coming to the rescue of the Russian electricity sector, as outgoing President Vladimir Putin backs a five-year expansion plan that will rival Vladimir Lenin's drives to electrify the nation.
An estimated 41,000 megawatts of new generating capacity is to come on line by 2011, much of it coal-fired rather than gas, a goal that is way out of reach for Russian machine builders, and even threatens to swamp the order books of global giants such as General Electric Co. and Siemens AG.
In search of an alternative, Russian power producer OGK-2 turned to a Chinese engineering firm, Harbin Power Equipment, granting it a tender to build two 660 MW coal-powered turbines by 2012. It was the first such deal in the sector between Russian and Chinese firms.
“It is simply a necessity for us to work with the Chinese. We will not get the capacity built otherwise,” said Stanislav Neveynitsyn, executive director of OGK-2, Russia's third biggest fossil fuel-run generator.
Power producers TGK-12 and TGK-13 — which are together installing 2200 MW by 2011 — have also visited engineering plants in China.
“I can tell you they liked what they saw,” Mr. Neveynitsyn said. “Our colleagues are watching our experience with the Chinese very closely.”
Russia's former electricity monopoly Unified Energy System (UES) designed the ambitious growth program for the sector, which it says needs $135-billion of investment by 2015 if Russia is to avoid a critical shortage of power.
The sector has not seen such an overhaul since Soviet leaders Mr. Lenin and Josef Stalin pushed to industrialize the country in the 1920s-1940s with little foreign help.
UES, the Soviet-era power monopoly they envisioned, is being split up and sold off by this summer to help pay for all the new constructions.
The investors buying up UES assets are committing to fulfill these expansion plans, meaning there are hundreds of construction tenders in the pipeline.
“The engineering firms that win these tenders will be those that give the best quality and price,” said Boris Vainzikher, chief technical officer of UES.
“But another factor is speed. If someone offers to build cheap and build well, but only by 2015, that won't work. So in this case, the Chinese won the tender.”
Going forward, speed could indeed become the main factor, as Russia plans to install some 280 turbines by 2011. Only Chinese engineers have proven capable of commissioning one per week, the pace Russia will require if it is to stave off a power crunch.
Both Russia's and China's electricity policy stand out from the West in their increasing use of coal-powered generators, whose emissions of greenhouse gases have made most Europeans move toward cleaner energy, such as nuclear and hydroelectric.
But in China, more than 80 per cent of power output came from coal-fired turbines in 2007, and Russia is pushing to make coal account for 37 per cent of the sector's fuel balance by 2015, up from 28 per cent today.
“There will be parallel growth in the use of all other fuel types, so of course the coal will have to outpace the amount of gas, nuclear and the other types of fuel being used,” said Dmitry Akhanov, head of Rosenergo, the sector's chief regulator.
He said 7000 MW of coal-run capacity will be installed by 2012, and that by 2020 the sector's coal consumption will rise to 300 million tonnes per year from 130 million today.
With one of the largest coal reserves in the world, Russia, unlike China, will not need to import the fuel, but it will need to import much of the technology to build its turbines.
“The domestic metallurgical and parts market simply cannot provide what we need,” said Yury Lastochkin, general director of NPO Saturn, a leading Russian turbine maker.
Mr. Lastochkin also conceded that Russian technology would need time to compete with foreign power engineering firms.
“The process of designing the turbines, and I'm talking about a quality product which will not lose out to foreign competitors, will require a lot of time and a lot of money.”
With Russian machine-builders increasingly squeezed by foreign competition, some lawmakers have floated the idea of passing laws to protect them.
But Yury Lipatov, chairman of the Russian parliament's energy committee, said that his main protectionist fears were directed not at Asian competitors but Europeans.
“The aim of the Europeans has always been to bury the competitors on the markets they enter,” Mr. Lipatov said. |
