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Poland Power Generation
In 1989 the electric power generation industry
comprised
seventy enterprises. Between 1980 and 1991, the industry's
power
production increased from 122 billion kilowatt hours to
135
billion kilowatt hours. By 1990 a large proportion of
obsolete or
aging generation machines and equipment required
replacement.
Modernization was especially critical to achieve efficient
utilization of fuels and to reduce transmission losses
through
the national power grid. A wide range of technical
improvements
and higher energy prices were expected to reduce losses
and waste
in 1992, making possible a subsequent reduction in annual
power
generation to 128 billion kilowatt hours. Estimates of
energy
price increases necessary to achieve conservation ranged
as high
as five times the subsidized levels of the late 1980s.
Meanwhile,
obstacles to energy conservation included the lack of
meters to
measure consumption, widespread use of central heating
without
charges proportional to consumption, and the high cost of
new
generating equipment, such as boilers, needed to upgrade
generation efficiency.
During the communist period, hydroelectric power
stations
were not expanded because of the easy availability of the
lignite
burned in conventional thermoelectric plants. All
hydroelectric
stations existing in 1992 were built before World War II.
Plans
in the 1980s called for construction of three nuclear
power
stations. The first, at Zarnowiec in south-central Poland,
was
scheduled to open in 1991 and be at full production in
1993.
After long years of construction and controversy, however,
doubts
about the safety of the station's Soviet-made equipment
(similar
to that used at Chernobyl') caused the first postcommunist
government to abandon the project. Some 86 percent of
participants in a 1990 referendum voted against
completion. A
second station had been started near Klempicz in
west-central
Poland, but work on it was stopped in 1989. The third
station
never passed the planning stage, and in 1992 Poland
remained
without any nuclear power capacity. It had, however,
joined its
Comecon partners in investing in large nuclear stations in
Ukraine, from which Poland received power in the 1980s.
The World Bank's advice on restructuring Poland's power
industry included reorganization into four or five
companies with
seventeen regional subsidiaries responsible for power
distribution. All these companies initially would be state
owned
but eventually would be privatized.
Data as of October 1992
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