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Poland is seeking to amend plans for utilities to spin off their coal assets, according to the minister in charge of managing state assets.
The European Union’s most coal-dependent nation has struggled with its energy transition, with the previous administration failing to complete a plan to separate the coal assets from utilities and move them to a separate entity — known as NABE — all in one go.
The current government’s plans regarding the ownership of coal mines and polluting power plants aren’t clear, with State Assets Minister Jakub Jaworowski calling the NABE carve-out “a kind of a nuclear option.” He said that “there are several options in between” which may be preferable, without providing details.
“Doing something quickly but in a wrong way didn’t work out,” Jaworowski told a group of reporters last week. “We need a little bit more time to prepare a holistic plan.”
Shares in the country’s biggest utilities, including PGE SA, Tauron Polska Energia SA and Enea SA, declined by as much as 7% last Wednesday after Finance Minister Andrzej Domanski said that there was no money for a NABE spin-off in next year’s budget. Still, Jaworowski said that resolving the issue is one of his priorities.
“We need to work out the decisions with an open mind and on a blank sheet of paper and then we can deal with the financial consequences,” he said. “We’re not saying yet what will happen, but something will be clarified in less than a year.”
Poland’s energy transition, which the previous government estimated would cost more than $300 billion, relies on external financing. However, increasingly environmentally conscious banks aren’t eager to be part of the process until the mostly state-run utilities come up with a plan to phase out coal-fired plants and shut down mines.
When planning the future of the coal units, which currently provide more than 60% of Polish electricity, the government needs to take into account power demand, costs, the environment as well as the interests of affected communities and workers, the minister said.
“One look at the Polish energy mix is enough to understand that we can’t afford to turn off the coal units just yet,” he said. “They will come off-line in time, but the trick is to find the right trajectory.”
(By Maciej Martewicz)
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