Russian Power Company Hopes to Export Electricity to China

Sep 23 - BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

Text of report in English by Russian news agency Prime-TASS

Moscow, 23 September: Russia's little-known Complex Energosystems holding is proposing to start electric power exports to China by supplying about 17bn kWh per year to the country, the holding's CEO Mikhail Slobodin said Thursday [23 September] at a Russian-Chinese seminar.

A project to export Russian electric power to China was proposed in the mid-90s but China was not interested then, Slobodin said. However, now China may be interested in importing power due to [its] deficit of power. To export power to China, an electric power line would need to be built from the town of Bratsk in Irkutsk Region to Beijing, Slobodin said. Slobodin said that the cost of building the electric power line from Bratsk to China is preliminarily estimated at 1.4-1.8bn US dollars, and may take three or four years [to build].

Complex Energosystems holding is a multi-profile power company, managing major network building companies in Siberia, which specialize in construction of transformation [transformer] substations and electric power lines.