BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec.8
By Tamilla Mammadova – Trend:
Rehabilitation of Georgian Enguri HPP will start in January 2021, Trend reports via Georgian media.
As a result, the HPP will stop generating electricity for 3 months due to repair works.
The project was also planned for 2018 and 2019, but it was eventually postponed until 2020. The Ministry of Finance has prepared a report on the cost-effectiveness of the Enguri HPP rehabilitation. According to the document, the project will halve the annual costs of HPP.
According to the report of the Ministry of Finance, the rehabilitation budget will be 96 million lari ($29.2 million), and as a result of the implementation, the annual cost of the HPP will be reduced from 47.9 million lari ($14.5 million) to 24 million lari ($7.3 million).
However, the benefit of rehabilitation is over 264 million lari ($80.4 million), in a period of 15 years.
“As for the effect of the rehabilitation, its purpose is to prevent an accident that might cause shut down of the HPP for a long time. The matter concerns the rehabilitation of a 2.5 km section of the tunnel. We do not have an illusion that the leaks will be completely eliminated, but we are sure that the problem will be arranged by about 30 percent -35 percent, which means about 100-120 million/kWh of electricity generation per year," Levan Mebonia, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Enguri said.
The Enguri HPP and the downstream Vardnili HPP Cascade were built during the 1960-70s as part of the same scheme. Enguri HPP (5 units of 260MW capacity each) releases its water into the Vardnili HPP water channel, where four power plants were initially in operation. Three of these plants were destroyed during the civil war in the early 1990s. The Enguri HPP itself suffered from lack of maintenance and until recently only four out of five units were operating at 80 percent of their capacity.
The EBRD has been involved in the refurbishment of the Enguri Hydro Power Plant since 1998, initially with civil works on the dam, later with the refurbishment of the units at the power plant.
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