Greece’s leading engineering group Mytilineos Holdings announced late Tuesday that it will proceed with the construction of a merchant power plant of 412 MW in the region of Viotia, south of Greece.
“The decision has been taken within the global context of discussions being held with Endesa Group to create a strategic alliance for the Greek electricity market,” Mytilineos said in a statement.
The company also said that it will drop out from the Hellenic Transmission System Operator tender for the first private electricity production units which expires on Feb 22.
“The process up to now strongly suggests that the liberalization of the electricity market in Greece is ante portas with large companies’ investments to essentially contribute to competition,” Mytilineos said
“In this respect tender procedures, which were initialised back in 2000 in order to give incentives and subsidies to prospective local investors for isolated power units are considered by Mytilineos as no longer necessary,” it added.
The plant will be of combined cycle technology and will operate with natural gas as prime fuel. It is expected to produce 2500 GWh annually. The size of the investment is seen over EUR215 million.
Mytilineos subsidiary Metka will build the plant which is expected to commence operations by June 2009.
The new unit will be built nearby the Group’s CHP plant of 334 MW, which is under construction and it will be operable in July 2007.
HTSO’ s tender involves the construction of three private power generation units of over 300 MW each in the southern part of Greece.
Under the terms of the tender, HTSO will acquire from candidate IPP’s their availability capacity certificates for a 12 year period. The price of the availability capacity certificates will be determined according to the offers of the bidders and this should be in the range of a minimum of EUR35,000 per MW per year up to EUR92,000 per MW per year. HTSO is willing to pay up to 70% of the cost of the certificates.