OREANDA-NEWS. October 15, 2014. The IX National Congress “Industry Modernization of Russia: Development Priorities” took place. Participants included representatives of federal executive bodies, representatives of the largest Russian and foreign energy companies as well as independent industry experts.

The Head of the Department of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) for Control over Electric Power Industry, Vitaly Korolyov, made a presentation on the pressing issues of developing electric and heating power sectors at the Round Table on the “State and Trends of Developing Electric Power Industry in Russia”.

He outlined the main trends in developing the electric power industry and policy objectives of the energy sector. He also summed up the outcome of competitive capacity take-off (CCT) for 2015 that demonstrate an increased effect of competitive mechanisms on the capacity market. For example, the high level of competition in the first price zone resulted in increasing untaken capacity with regard to 2014 CCT by 4.9 times - from 3.1 GW to 15.4 GW and reducing capacity prices by 27.7% in comparison with the previous year (128,400 RUB/МW in comparison with 2014 CCT price at 133,000 RUB/MW). Overall, 15GW capacity was not taken off upon the outcome of CCT 2015 in the Russian Federation.

Vitaly Korolyov described the current problems with the electric networks and the necessary measures towards increasing networks efficiency: “benchmarking” of the costs of network companies and bringing the costs of servicing a conditional unit of electric network equipment of MRSK network organizations and other regional network organizations to a single standard.

He also emphasized that one of the major trends on the market of electric power and capacity is a dynamic growth of the share of distributed generation in producing electric power in the Russian Federation.

“An important step towards further reforms and liberalizing legal relations in the electric power industry was adopting the Road Map on “Implementing the Targeted Model of the Heating Energy Market” by RF Government on 2nd October 2014. To a considerable extent, the Road Map is designed to avoid excessive government regulation in tariff-setting for heat supplies and replacing the mechanism with competitive institutions coordinated by the antimonopoly authority. It is primarily supporting non-discriminatory access to heating supply services and establishing specifics of antimonopoly regulation and control in this field”, said Vitaly Korolyov.