Furnaces No. 15, 16, 17 and 8 have already been shut down at the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant, and after restoration after the repair of furnace No. 6, it will also be turned off. In total, five electric furnaces will be decommissioned.
According to the press service of the enterprise, the reason for the curtailment of production was not only the lull in the metallurgical market.
October began for ferroalloys with another jump in electricity prices, and at once by 26%. If we talk about the price of electricity, then it has several components - these are the base price, transmission and dispatching costs.
“Only the base price for electricity for us increased in October from the September level from UAH 1,650 to UAH 2,175, and from the average price of 2020 by UAH 1,093. This means that for the year the price for us has more than doubled. The monthly rise in the cost of these costs reaches 95 million hryvnia, excluding VAT, which is 71% of the wages fund, "- said at the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant.
In this regard, at the next meeting, the general director of the plant noted that “no one is interested in reducing production volumes, but at this stage the situation is such that an increase in the cost of electricity entails a reduction in profitability, and hence a reduction in production. And no one will work at a loss. ”
“In 2020, the price changed monthly, and I was forced to speak in the Verkhovna Rada, noting that the country was not ready to introduce the electricity market. The very idea of the market was that we could choose among many manufacturers and vary the price, buy electricity cheaper. But none of this happened, in fact, we could only buy more expensive. So even then - in 2020 - the average price for 1000 kWh was 1295 hryvnia. And in October this year, we were offered the same volume for 2508 hryvnia. Almost twice as high! And let's, and we will double the prices for products! But who will buy it from us? Therefore, even in this situation, we try to minimize losses. First of all, we are tightening the requirements for energy consumption. Previously, we worked with three-zone tariffs in mind, then we switched to an even schedule. All the time we are forced to change the ideology of this work. There are hourly statistics, and each hour has its own load, from this the tariff jumps. Therefore, we set ourselves the task of adjusting hourly to this schedule. This is a difficult task, but we are working on it, ”said Vladimir Kutsin.
Nevertheless, the enterprise is forced to shut down the furnace units, which means that a certain number of maintenance personnel will be removed from idle time, which will be idle with payment of 2/3 of the tariff.
