Hydropower plants for sale

31/05/2011 15:00

For the first time in our country’s history, the government has
officially started selling the electric power plants to private
companies, a sector that has been a state owned property for several decades, since they
were constructed.

The Ministry of Economy prepared a draft-law which will put on sale four hydro power plants, the one of Ulza, Shkopet and two others in Bistrica. The draft has been sent to the Economy Commission and is expected to be voted this Wednesday. The first move is removing these power plants from the state owned Energy Corporation and temporarily declaring them as individual companies. But this will be only for a short period, because right after their detachment from Energy Corporation, they will start the privatization.

The government has left two privatization variants in this draft, the direct sale and concession. According to the draft, the government will offer buyers more than 51% shares of every object. These four hydro power plants have an installed power off 77 MW, equals to 5.3% of the total power. In 2010, according to official data, these four hydro power plants produced 406 million KW in total, 5.5% of the total production.

The Energy Corporation accumulated last year a turnover of 200 Million Euros, which means that with the four power plants, the government is selling a business that generates an average of 10 million Euros per year. The government is prepared to sell them within this year, and they even say in the relation that the money will be used for financing public investments of 2011. This practice could open way to other big sales in energy. Only one week ago, the Prime Minister Berisha warned a campaign of privatizations and declared that the government will keep only dikes, schools, hospitals and public lands.

Different to other privatizations, this time it seems that the reason for selling public property is not only management improvement and decrease of corruption, but also the need of covering big budget expenses and for controlling the increased public debt.

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