“The government is planning to announce in the next few days a support programme worth around PLN 5 billion for energy-intensive enterprises”, says Minister for Development and Technology Waldemar Buda. In addition, the government expects that the European Commission (EC) will soon propose a system that relates energy prices to production prices, by limiting the ETS system.

“We are preparing, and I think that within a few days we will announce a programme for energy-intensive enterprises. They include the biggest steel mills, the biggest companies that consume the most electricity that generate the biggest cost in production and for them we will have a huge programme, estimated for about PLN 5 billion. It will be enough for these giants,” Minister Buda.

The head of the Ministry of Development and Technology (MRiT) recalled that the Polish government is expecting a reaction from the European Commission on the European market.

“The most important are the actions on the side of the European Commission. It has the instruments, because the whole energy market is a European system. It has the tools that it has announced, but we do not yet see the specifics that the Commission can launch”, the minister stressed.

According to him, concrete proposals may appear on 14 September this year in the annual speech of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and the Polish government is expecting above all that the price of energy should be correlated with production prices.

“Today we have a situation in which in the course of a single day the price can rise by 30% or fall by 30%. This is a very high degree of instability resulting from speculation and market sentiment. We cannot have a situation where 1 MWh will cost PLN 2.7 thousand one day and PLN 1.7 thousand the next,’ stressed the head of MRiT.

Minister Buda added that such a system has failed in times of crisis, and he cannot imagine that the EC will not take action to limit the ETS and to shut down the exchange.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński