In a recent commentary by Grzegorz Nowaczewski for Biznes Alert website, the president of Virtual Power Plant writes: „The financial value of energy companies listed on the stock exchanges drops dramatically. Germany recently announced a transformation of another of these companies. What is the future of Polish energy companies? It is already cheaper to buy power abroad.
The answer to the question of the profitability of investments in the energy sector is simpler than it might appear, though not obvious. If we build a modern coal-fired power plant in Europe, an investment in each of 100 MW will amount to about 190 million euros in costs. In 2010 media wrote about power plants of 800 MW capacity for $ 1.5 billion.
If an alternative to investment in conventional power generation sources will be construction of a virtual power plant, or Virtual Power Plant (VPP) – the cost probably would be much lower. The problem is, it is not easy to find reliable calculations. Defining VPP as a clearing platform between multiple active consumers of energy and implementation of the current management of the demand side of several hundred megawatts of power – personally, I pre-estimate costs of the creation of virtual power plant with a capacity of 100 MW as approximately 28 million euros.”