The Kaliningrad plant will have its Unit One commissioned next year, said the minister.
Among other pivotal power projects for 2005, he highlighted a thermal plant in Sochi, on the Black Sea coast. Also to be commissioned next year, it will steady up power supplies to the Krasnodar Territory, with primary attention to its many coastal health resorts.
Siberia's Irganai district plant and upcoming units of the Bureya district plant, on the border of the Amur Region and the Khabarovsk Territory in the Russian Far East, are also scheduled for commissioning.
Once commissioned, the new grid projects will take West Siberian-generated electricity to Central Russia and the Urals, and bring electricity from the Kola Peninsula to the entire Russian northwest, with the closest attention to St. Petersburg, said Mr. Khristenko.
The United Russian Power Grid (UES) company has come up with a programme of its own. The company intends to establish a holding for hydropower industrial construction in neighbouring Central Asian countries-the Sangtudeh plant in Tajikistan and the Kambarata in Kyrgyzstan.
UES participation in their construction will promote integrating Russia's power grids with those of its immediate neighbours and partners on the EURASEC (Eurasian Economic Community) and the quadripartite United Economic Environment. Such integration will help to liberalise the foreign energy market.
Sangtudeh plant construction is scheduled to take four years. The UES and the Federal Grid Company have earmarked sizeable investment in the project next year. Some money will come from the federal purse as Tajikistan is converting its US$50 million debt to Russia into payments in kind. There are other ways to back the endeavour-to attract loans and make transactions, on varying patterns, with other tentative investors, the minister went on.
The sources and amount of Russian corporate participation in the project will be specified after related Tajik-Iranian negotiations finish, he added.
As Mr. Khristenko came over to a prospective UES reform, he said the company would keep on its restructuring according to field of activity. It will strike all export/import transactions off its balance sheets next year to pass them to INTER UES Co., which may eventually become affiliate to the Federal Grid Company, said the Energy Minister.
