Yerevan/Mediamax/. Head of the Investment Department of “Electricity Networks of Armenia” (ENA) CJSC, Yuri Gavrilenko, thinks that forcing the company to make investments into solar energy may bring to considerable growth of tariffs.

Yuri Gavrilenko said this in the interview to Mediamax commenting on the statement of the Coordinator of the National Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program of Armenia, Ara Marjanyan, who said that it’s necessary to make ENA stimulate the development of the solar energy.

Head of ENA Investment Department said that the considerable part of Armenia’s territory is subject to increased sun exposure, which is evidence of significant potential for the development of solar power engineering. At the same time, Yuri Gavrilenko said, there are a number of problems on the path of development of the solar power engineering in Armenia.

One of the basic problems is the isolation of Armenia’s electricity infrastructure from large regional consumers experiencing electricity shortage, he said in the interview to Mediamax.

“Solar power engineering has huge unevenness of production both in daily and in annual cycle. In conditions of isolation and impossibility to compensate the peaks of energy production and consumption, significant energy production facilities may simply stand idle for a long period of time. Thus, we will have to create storage plants which will much more reduce the total coefficient of efficiency of the system,” ENA representative said.

Yuri Gavrilenko also noted that solar power engineering technologies are still at the initial stage of development; this is why they are very expensive. “The prime cost of 1 kilowatt-hour (taking into account amortization) will make AMD 90-100, and AMD 500-600 for photovoltaic stations,” the head of ENA Investment Department told Mediamax.

According to him, forcing the company to make investments into solar energy may cause significant growth of tariffs.

“Out of all nontraditional and renewable sources, solar energy has the hugest potential and today tendencies worldwide are directed to ecologically pure production technologies. At the same time, we think that today we have to use the resources of hydropower stations, simultaneously creating basic principles and a governmental strategy in this direction. We believe it will be in big demand in the future,” Yuri Gavrilenko stated.