All necessary procedures for public supplier election are not done yet. Therefore, we don’t expect electricity price to rise on 1 April i.e. it is logical to expect electricity price increase since 1 May.
EPS does everything in order to complete these procedures so they will be able to submit a request for electricity price increase and it is not possible that this will be finished until 15 March- Dejan Vasic, Director of EPS Distribution said on press conference.
Therefore, we don’t expect electricity price increase on 1 April because it is necessary to inform all consumers about price increase 15 days earlier.
EPS Managing Board chosen dependent industrial society included in EPS to do public supply of consumers at regulated prices. Government is now asked to give approval on public supplier elections. Government is expected to give this approval in a week or so- Dejan Trifunovic, Deputy Minister of Energy, said.
Public supplier must get a license, for public supply activity, from Energy Agency afterwards, and only then it will be able to ask for price increase. Energy Agency also needs a certain period of time to reconsider this request and to do all analysis and estimations of this request’s validity.
EPS didn’t want to guess when these procedures can be done.
According to estimations, it is real for electricity price to increase since 1 May. It had been announced to happen on 1 April, earlier. Electricity price in Serbia increased for the last time on 1 April 2011 by 15% and in March 2010 by 10%. Average electricity price in Serbia is 5,5 eurocents per kilowatt-hour.
Serbian electricity consumers will be obligated to pay 16 dinars’ fee for renewable sources electricity for the first time. This fee which will amount 0,044 dinars per kilowatt-hour will be represented as separate item on electricity bill and it will depend on total consumption- Dejan Vasic said.
He stated that the fee will amount 16 dinars per month for average household that use 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity monthly. Vucic précised that EPS is obligated to collect assets for electricity produced from renewable sources and stressed that it doesn’t mean that EPS increases electricity price, it means that this money will be paid on special bank account designed for investors that invest in renewable energy sources in Serbia.
Special, privileged tariffs that last 12 years are valid for these investors according to an order for stimulating measures.
Dejan Trifunovic announced that consumers in Serbia will pay for these fees 400 dinars monthly on average until 2020, considering that Serbian plans and obligations were to have installed 1092 MW for renewable sources electricity production. Trifunovic said that he expects 10 million EUR to be collected for investors that invest in “green energy” according to prescribed stimulating feed-in-tariffs that are paid by ultimate consumers.
He announced that money collected from consumers on this base will be paid to investors who already produce electricity from renewable sources in Serbia. Assets’ overage from year fee will be transferred to payments to investors in the next year because renewable sources electricity production is expected to increase and the amount of fee will be changed every year- Trifunovic added.
Source Serbia Energy/MERZ/EPS
