How much light for China

Hello dear guests and subscribers of my channel. Recently, I began to repeatedly hear angry reviews that, they say, we sell electricity abroad for a penny, and inside the country we sell it in three roads.

I understand that most people think at the common level and do not see much difference in the wholesale price and the retail price for the end consumer. And many begin to scold our power engineers for what the light is, and accuse our managers of incompetence. In particular, China is often mentioned. In this article I will try to understand this issue.

Valid rates and real data

So, let's start with the fact that no one knows exactly how much one kilowatt * hour really costs for the Celestial Empire on the wholesale market. As they say, this information is a trade secret.

And personally, I can only operate on data from almost three years ago. So, according to the data of 2018, electricity was sold to China at 2.7 rubles per kW * h. And in the same time period, for example, for the Jewish Autonomous Region, the average tariff was 3.8 rubles per 1 kW * h.

And here, anticipating a wave of indignation, I want to immediately highlight one very important point: the price of energy exports and the price for the end consumer are two values ​​that cannot be directly compared like this.

For an adequate comparison, let's turn to the archived data and find out how much electricity cost on the wholesale market for the domestic market.

So, it turns out that for the first price zone (Central part of Russia and the Urals) the cost of one kilowatt * hour amounted to approximately 1.25 rubles, and for the second price zone (Siberia) this price for the same one kilowatt * hour was equal to 0.8 rubles.

If we compare these figures already, we can see that electricity is sold in the Celestial Empire at rather high prices. And to call them underestimated, the language does not turn out to be.

In addition, I would also like to emphasize that it is the surplus that remains from the generation of electricity that is sold to China. And according to contractual obligations, Russia does not have any mandatory minimum volumes for supplies.

That is, if a situation arises that the generated energy will be fully consumed on the domestic market, then our main exporter, Inter RAO, will not sell a single kilowatt.

And the profits from the sale of electricity to China are partially used to subsidize tariffs for the Far East.

So what happens? If you look at this question superficially, it seems that our power engineers are selling electricity for a pittance abroad, and three skins are being torn from the local population. But if you look at the issue in detail, it turns out that despite the rather high tariffs within the country, we sell electricity abroad at quite adequate prices.

Always approach sensitive issues critically, and before you chop off the shoulder, you need to understand everything.

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