December 20 (SeeNews) - Bulgaria hopes to choose by end-June a strategic investor for a 49% stake in its planned 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant and has asked bidders to improve their offers, the CEO of the country's power grid operator NEK said on Thursday.
NEK will have a 51% stake in the company that will build and operate the Belene plant power plant.
The procedure for choosing a strategic investor for the Belene nuclear plant should be completed by the end of the first half of 2008, NEK CEO Lyubomir Velkov told a news conference.
Velkov also said the government has invited all potential investors to improve their offers by January 9.
Five European majors - Belgian Electrabel, Czech CEZ, German E.ON and RWE, and Italian ENEL – in October filed preliminary bids to acquire up to 49% of the company that will build and operate the plant.
The nuclear power plant will be built by Russia's Atomstroyexport to which NEK (formerly NETC) awarded a 3.99 billion euro ($5.7 billion) deal in November last year. A consortium of French AREVA and German Siemens will act as sub-contractor.
Bulgaria, which joined the EU on January 1, hopes that the Belene plant will make up for the generating capacity and power exports the country lost after closing down a second pair of Soviet-built reactors of 440 MW each at its sole Kozloduy nuclear power plant at the end of 2006 to address nuclear safety concerns of the European Union. It closed the first pair of 440-MW reactors at Kozloduy in 2002 under pressure from the European Union. Now Kozloduy operates its two remaining nuclear reactors of 1,000 MW each.
The country expects to export some 4.5 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity in 2007, down from 7.7 billion kWh last year, Velkov said, raising an earlier forecast for the country's 2007 exports of 3.6 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity.
($ = 0.6976 euro)