The public company Srbijagas remains a monopolist on gas imports in Serbia, although another importer could be found in Horgos, where Russian gas is being taken, said Janez Kopac, director of the Energy Community Secretariat, presenting the annual report on Serbia’s progress in energy in 2019. He also stated that Serbiagas had not completed the transformation and separated the transport business from distribution, which was a long-standing obligation of this company.
Digger said that the situation is no better even when it comes to electricity, where EPS is still dominant. He also stressed that Serbia should turn to the use of liquid natural gas, which is the cheapest in the last decade because of large production.
To the statement of Politika that Serbia does not have the possibility to take liquid natural gas because it does not have its terminals necessary to translate this gas from one state to another, Kopac said that this was not about “molecules” but about the fact that this gas is the cheapest. and that Serbia has the most expensive gas for industry, and it is a pity that it does not consume it instead of natural gas. He pointed out that an LNG terminal could be found soon in Krk, and that the EU is giving 100 million euros to realize this important project.
Asked about the fate of the Turkish Stream, which was completed through Serbia, Kopac said that the pipeline would be there, but that there was no competition as the Energy Community had insisted, and that the influence of Russian gas and Srbijagas remained dominant.
He added that there was not much progress in terms of changing the energy policy in the field of renewable energy sources, because, instead of the current incentives, feed-in tariffs given to investors, Serbia could auction that “green energy”, which from some this is not the reason why EPS and all citizens of Serbia are paying an additional 100 euros million to buy “green kilowatts”.
Asked if this would again be a reason for the price of electricity in Serbia due to feed-in tariffs, he replies that the price of kilowatts in our country is unrealistically low, at the expense of EPS, and that electricity will have to go up. He notes that protection must be made for the socially most vulnerable categories of electricity consumers.
The digger reminds that electricity will also have to go up due to the fact that coal-producing countries are forced to pay clean gas by paying taxes on their emissions, and that this tax can raise electricity prices by up to 25 percent.
Serbia can only boast that it has made progress in the field of energy efficiency, where the greatest progress has been made in the implementation of the planned plans, Politika reports.
