In 2022 Armenia exported more electricity to Georgia than in the past 10 years, Deputy Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Hakob Vardanyan said on January 11 at the sitting of the parliamentary standing committee on economic issues in the National Assembly.
For example, Armenia exported 365 million kilowatt-hours to Georgia in 2022, compared to 242 million from 2012 to 2021 inclusive.
"This is mainly due to the liberalization of the market, which started last year. The simplification has extended to exports as well. It used to be very difficult to get a permit. It was necessary to collect papers from Electricity System Operator, Electricity System Settlement Center, High Voltage Network of Armenia, as well as from the Public Services Regulatory Commission, which regulated the market," Vardanyan explained.
According to him, while the power plants wishing to export received all these permits, the window of opportunity in the Georgian market was narrowing day by day.
Now the procedure for obtaining a permit has become as simple as possible. So, any exporter, whether it is a power plant or its distributor, if it has free electricity that it has not committed to supply to the local market, can simply submit an application, attach an export contract with an hourly delivery schedule, and the System Operator, in turn, will have to allow or prohibit delivery within one day. In this case, the ban must be justified.
"After that, the operator itself, automatically, instructs the high-voltage network to let the declared volume of electricity through abroad. Thus, as a result of the simplification of the above-mentioned procedures, in the first 8 months of 2022, the power line leading to Georgia was fully loaded," said a representative of the Government.
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