Page 62 - UKRRptJan21

prices for households as of January 2021​, local media reported the same day.
Namely, the government amended a resolution to cancel the discounted price for the first 100 kWh of monthly electricity use (UAH0.9/kWh). In this way, all the electricity consumed by households will be priced at a flat rate of UAH1.68/kWh. The last time electricity prices for households were increased was in March 2017.
In this way, the average price of electricity consumed by households will increase by over 40% as of January 2021, which more or less corresponds to accumulated consumer inflation since 2017 (about 36%).
If the regulation is not cancelled in the near future, this will benefit the state energy trading company Guaranteed Buyer, whose budget gap will be significantly reduced. In turn, Guaranteed Buyer will have much more funds to improve its payment discipline to green energy producers like DTEK Renewables (DTEREN).
In 11M20, Guaranteed Buyer paid only UAH22.1bn to green energy producers while having purchased electricity from them for UAH45.6bn. With the higher household rates and with the 2021 state budget foreseeing state financing for Guaranteed Buyer of up to UAH24bn, the problem of poor payments to renewable energy producers should significantly improve next year. All this should improve the price of the DTEREN-2024 bond, which trades at 11.6% YTM currently.
Ukraine’s power plants reduced their coal consumption by 32% through October​ and increased their gas use by 31%, reports Expro.com, citing Energy Ministry numbers. Coal consumption fell to 14.1mn tons, while gas consumption rose 3.9bn cubic meters.
During this decade, Ukraine’s electricity production from nuclear will rise from 53% today, to 57% in 2030. ​At the same time, the electricity share from coal will drop almost in half, to 12%. These were the predictions made yesterday by Maksym Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest privately owned energy company. Coal-fired power plants increasingly be used as standby sources of electricity, predicted Timchenko, whose company employs thousands of coal miners and operates most of Ukraine’s coal-fired power plants.
New Jersey’s Holtec International has completed the first $70mn stage of a 20-year, $1.3bn project to build a nuclear spent fuel storage repository near Chornobyl​. The site will take waste from three of Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants – Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, South Ukraine. Ukraine’s fourth plant, Zaporizhzhia, has its own onsite, US-designed storage facility. Ukraine’s new central repository, located three km west of the abandoned Chornobyl power station and 150 km north of Kyiv, is to start accepting nuclear waste next June. This step will save Ukraine $200mn a year -- a fee currently paid to Russia to reprocess and store Ukraine’s spent nuclear fuel.
62​ UKRAINE Country Report​ January 2021 ​ ​www.intellinews.com