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Drought causes Serbian hydropower plants’ production to decline, yet electricity continues to be exported

Date: September 24^th 2009 Author: Dragan Obradović, Belgrade Category: Articles
Topic: Electricity

All watercourses across Serbia have been affected by drought since early September, so daily production of the run-of river hydropower plants in the first ten days of the respective month is by 10 per cent lower compared to the balanced one. However, coal-fired thermal power plants of Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) performed great in these days, generating daily by 9 per cent more power than it is foreseen in the balance average for September.

Coal reserves at thermal power plant dumps and water reserves in impoundment hydropower plant reservoirs continue to exceed the balance reserves for 2009. Moreover, the reserves of coal surmount balance figures by as much as 29 per cent while daily consumption in Serbia amounts to some 77 million kilowatt hours, which is by 3.7 per cent less than the September average. As a result, EPS has been selling two million kilowatt hours a day on the open market this moth.

PHOTO: Alenka Žumbar

Miladin Basaric, Head of the Sector for Energy Planning and Management at EPS’ Electricity Trade Department has predicted that the September electricity balance was going to be stable and reliable.

On average, the gross daily consumption in Serbia this August totalled 77.1 million kilowatt hours. Favourable flow rate of the Danube in the beginning of the past month enabled the monthly performance of run-of river hydropower plants to exceed the planned one by 17 million kilowatt hours. The overall result of EPS as regards power generation (over three billion kWh in August) outpaced the planned figures by 210 million kWh or by 7.6 per cent and exceeded the results from last August by 5.3 per cent.

PHOTO: © European Communities, 2009

Coal-fired thermal power plants have contributed 1.96 billion kWh into the system, exceeding the balance production by 7.1 per cent and the August 2008 figures by 5.2 per cent. Owing to an excellent performance of both, thermal power plants and hydropower plants, and a smaller consumption EPS was able to sell 224 million kWh of electricity on the open market in August alone, in addition to having met the demand of domestic tariff purchasers which amounted to some 3.1 billion kilowatt hours monthly.

Between January 1 and now, EPS has exported over 1.3 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, worth some 55 million Euros.

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