Yesterday’s meeting of all interested parties in Nicosia for the electrical interconnection helped to clarify that the loan for the project, at a certain percentage of its final cost, is the IPTO that will request and be charged and not the two governments, as they insisted on submitting the updates from competent authorities in Greece.
The situation is somewhat clearer today. But not more optimistic. The two governments chose the EIB to conduct the due diligence study, based on the decision of Christodoulides and Mitsotakis in November. It took almost seven months to request the EIB to carry out the study. Even today we do not know exactly who will conduct the study. The bank’s technocrats or a private sector company, as has happened in the past? If the latter is done, some time will be lost for its procedures as well.
In any case, we will have to wait several months to learn from the EIB the cost of the interconnection electricity based on current data, the revised completion time of the project in the event that it proceeds and, ultimately, its viability for investors and its benefit for the electricity users. If issues of proportional cost sharing are also included.. you get it…
We wonder whether the study will also cover the huge geopolitical issue or whether it will bypass it too, until we find it blocking our way in action, if the techno-economic study comes to a positive conclusion and gives the green light to the implementing body.
We read that technical or other similar problems of a large project are definitely the objects of a due diligence study. Will the EIB examine the geopolitical obstacles? And if the EIB or its subcontractor does not examine them, who will examine them, so that at some point we will know comprehensively whether the interconnection project can be done – and we can bring it to fruition – with benefit to all, regardless of outrageous objections of Turkish or other origin?
In any case, even if we accept that indeed “the project has been put back on the grid”, it is clear that the electrical interconnection cannot be operational in 2030, nor even 3-4 years later.
So, the debate about whether or not interconnection is beneficial or whether Makis Keravnos was right or wrong, etc., may temporarily be removed from the discussion table, since we will wait for the EIB to tell us that. But at the same time, electrical interconnection must be removed, at least for a few years, from any energy plans of Cyprus with all the benefits that we initially anticipated: the possibility of channeling surplus green energy to external networks, the prospect of importing cheaper electricity from other networks, the security and balancing of the system, and other miscellaneous things.
And given that we have already forgotten (postponed, to be precise, to around 2030) the import of natural gas through the terminal in Vasilikos, it is obvious that the fairy tales are over and no one is justified in resorting to them anymore.
In short, we are left alone, with the EAC’s conventional units, some in a bad state and some with an expiration date of late 2029, with the private renewable energy parks without storage capacity for the time being and for a long time to come, with our home photovoltaics that satisfactorily relieve those who have them and those who have not doubled their electricity consumption amid the apotheosis of their aristocratic ruralism, with the system’s stability problems due to the abandoned Dhekelia and the production limits in Vasiliko, with the risks of possible electricity shortages during peak hours and, let’s not forget, the very high cost of electricity, which is largely determined by the international oil market. And with a competitive market, so to speak, in which fewer and fewer people now believe in, given the particular conditions in the country.
So now that the expectations are over, some other decisions must be made, in a hurry. For more and cheaper electricity. These elections will be gone soon, and the next ones are coming. Which will not be as boring and indifferent as the parliamentary ones.
