EU funds availability for nuclear power needs to be restored, says strategic energy head
The availability of EU funding for nuclear power needs to be restored, the government plenipotentiary for strategic energy infrastructure Wojciech Wrochna told the FISA Euradwaste 2025 conference. He added that it was possible that something concrete could be achieved on this issue in the coming months.
"We need to restore the availability of EU funding for nuclear power. I believe that in the coming months we can achieve something tangible," Wrochna said.
As he pointed out, at the moment it is almost impossible to find EU funds in which a nuclear power plant can participate.
"We clearly see that it is almost impossible to find an EU fund where nuclear power can get money, of course it is a political decision. I believe that we are in a situation now where we can change that," Wrochna stressed.
"Therefore, in Poland we have no choice but to finance it from the state budget. The Polish programme for the construction of the first nuclear power plant (...) will be 30 percent financed through equity, 70 percent through loans, and this 30 percent (...), about EUR 15 billion, will come directly from the state budget as a capital injection to the special purpose company, i.e. the investor," he added.
As Wrochna stressed, this EUR 15 billion is secured, so Poland has money to develop this project. He noted that at this stage the risk of the project is still high, and it would not be possible to finance it with private funds only.
In Wrochna's opinion, it is generally difficult to realise projects of building large nuclear power plants without public funds, which also include EU funds that are almost unavailable for nuclear energy at the moment. Poland, for which this is the first nuclear project, has additional difficulties.
"We do not have a commercially operating plant, and we cannot expand the existing infrastructure; it is a greenfield project, where planning is much more complicated and costs are higher," Wrochna pointed out.
"We don't have a proven licensing capability and when we go to the market and talk to lenders about financing, the discussion is much more complicated than for other EU countries and yet the EU situation is different from the rest of the world," he added.
The government plenipotentiary stressed that such projects are difficult to realise without public support also due to the uncertainty of the regulatory environment, while at the same time the long period of implementation (about 15 years) and operation (about 60 years) makes it difficult to raise private funds.
The power plant in Pomerania is to have three reactors built using AP1000 technology from the US company Westinghouse with a total capacity of 3.75 GW. Electricity from the first reactor is expected to flow in 2036.
In its notification application to the European Commission, Poland set the cost of the investment at PLN 192 billion (EUR 45 bln). The government plans to recapitalise the 100-percent state owned SPV PEJ implementing the project by the State Treasury at a level of about PLN 60 billion (EUR 15 bln), but a positive decision from the European Commission on the state support mechanism is needed.
jz/ ao/