Tauron power hopes for extension of capacity market to 2028

"Apart from unit 910 - which is the New Jaworzno, we have twelve Class 200 units in our group, two units of them have a capacity market until 2028," Lot said.

"The rest of the units have a capacity market ending in 2025. There is a lot of work going on at the moment and there are several perspectives," he added.

As the CEO pointed out, the first perspective is legislative and concerns the creation of the capacity market for the next three years.

"We are heavily involved in this work - in consultations and opinions. The first draft of the law has appeared, there is now another draft. The results of this work are so optimistic that we believe that this power market will work. All the more so because the statements by [Poland's power grid operator] PSE say unequivocally that this power is needed," Lot said.

"We take a product approach to our assets - on one side we have a product, which is electricity produced from renewable sources in the whole ecosystem with storage (...). The other perspective is conventional energy produced mainly in the 910 unit - there is a large volume of electricity there and also coal consumption," he explained.

Tauron's CEO added that the group's third product is power, i.e. safety.

"That is why we have bicentennials who are ready to sell a product to the market during the transition period," he said.

"On one side we have these units, we know that they run out of the capacity market in 2025. If there was no capacity market, or this market would be economically unattractive for us, we communicate unequivocally that these units will be switched off," he added.

Tauron's CEO added that this statement was also presented to the social side.

"We are preparing the organisation in terms of both business and social aspects, although our common goal is to sell our product to a market that needs this power," Lot said.

"In the statements of PSE in the perspective of 2028 - every unit, every power is needed to stabilise the operation of the system," he added.

Lot pointed out that the company believes that auctions will be announced in the first quarter of 2024, possibly in the first half of the year, and Tauron will be interested in participating in them.

"We will join these auctions or try to join them, depending on the conditions, and if we win this capacity auction, we will continue the work and this scenario will be repeated for the next three years until 2028," he said.

"We have three years to work with PSE and with the legislature to come up with what the back-up power in the system should look like after 2028," the CEO announced.

----------------

The group's EBIT in the third quarter of 2024 amounted to PLN 946 million (EUR 219.6 mln), while sales and compensation revenues amounted to PLN 8.126 billion (EUR 1.9 bln). These results are also in line with the company's previous forecast.

After the three quarters of 2024, the group had approximately PLN 38 billion (EUR 8.9 bln) in revenue, PLN 3.8 billion (EUR 882 mln) in EBIT, PLN 5.5 billion (EUR 1.3 bln) in EBITDA and PLN 2.3 billion (EUR 533.8 mln) in net profit.

mcb/ ao/