Ukraine Reconstruction Campaigner
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Anna is Bankwatch’s Ukraine Reconstruction Campaigner, working on green reconstruction and environmental safeguards in Ukraine’s recovery. Her work focuses on alternative sources of energy for communities, energy resilience, and the alignment of Ukraine’s energy policy and public investment management system with EU standards. Originally from Kyiv, she holds an MSc in Environmental Sciences and Policy from Central European University and is based in Bratislava.
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Pljevlja’s 210 MW lignite power plant, operating since 1982 in northern Montenegro, has caused controversy since the beginning of its lifetime. Even back in late ’70s Yugoslavia when the project was being planned, residents succeeded in pressing for the chimney to be taller than planned (250 metres instead of 200 metres) in an attempt to ensure that the plant’s pollution rose above the hills surrounding Pljevlja and dispersed further away.
While governments in south-east Europe have been talking about building new lignite power plants for years, the only one under construction to date is Energy Financing Team’s (EFT) 300 MW Stanari plant in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rather than serving as an inspiration to others in the region, the project is an example of what not to do, as borne out by an official complaint submitted in January by NGOs Center for Environment from Banja Luka and ClientEarth to the Vienna-based Energy Community Treaty secretariat.
Where’s Plan B for Kosovo’s energy sector?
March 20, 2014 | Read more
Ideas about the construction of a new lignite power plant in Kosovo have existed since the end of the 1980s, and even the current Kosova e Re proposal – scaled down to 600 MW from the original 2100 MW – has been around since 2009. It is being touted by the Kosovo government, the World Bank, USAID and the European Commission among others as the only realistic option to replace the ageing and heavily polluting Kosovo A power plant.
The European NGO coalition Counter Balance has recently published a short overview of the new energy policies now in place at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). Both banks’ new policies were finalised towards the end of 2013 following extensive consultation with stakeholders from the energy sector, civil society and academia.
A new report published on March 10 by a team of researchers from the University of Oxford, based on the largest ever study of large hydroelectric dams (245 in 65 countries) has found that in most cases large dams are economically not viable and few, if any, will realise their planned benefits. The study assessed the costs, construction time, and benefits of all large dams built around the world since 1934, and further concluded that the severe cost and construction delays that so often dog large dams (defined in this research as those that exceed 15 metres in height) mean they can be seriously damaging to the economies that attach so much hope to them.
