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Over the last few years Hungary’s retail gas and electricity markets have been significantly restructured by the state. Competition has been more or less eliminated from the household segment of the gas market and after a little more than a decade the market has come full circle - Hungarian households cannot choose their natural gas supplier. The program announced by the National Energy Strategy in 2011 to acquire direct public ownership of energy utilities has been essentially completed in the gas market. Since October 2016 FŐGÁZ – a gas supplier now under state supervision – has been serving the consumers that had previously been supplied by TIGÁZ. At the end of the year the universal service provider purchased from GDF SUEZ during the summer of 2015 and renamed ENKSZ Észak-Dél Regionális Földgázszolgáltató Zrt. was also merged into FŐGÁZ. Thus, 2017 started with FŐGÁZ becoming the one and only supplier of the universal service market with a sales volume of 3.5 billion m3 (accounting for 45% of the total market).

Approved in 2011, Hungary’s National Energy Strategy picked the ideal electricity mix over the next 20 years. The Energy Strategy analysed several power plant scenarios for the period until 2030, and determined that the so-called nuclear-coal-green scenario was the most promising. This scenario includes the construction of a new coal-fired block of 440 MW and two new nuclear blocks in Paks accounting for 1200 MW each, in addition to the 20-year lifetime extension of the existing Paks nuclear power plant blocks. For renewables, the scenario uses the National Energy Utilization Action Plan as a baseline counting with 1.4GW renewable capacity by 2020 and 2.2 GW by 2030. However, one of the latest publications of REKK1 estimates that an additional 2 GW solar – or equivalent renewable – capacity would be needed to complete the 2020 renewable targets. This analysis looks at the impact of the various renewable scenarios on the production and profitability of the existing and planned Paks power plant blocks.

Lowering demand and spread between natural gas prices calls for transmission tariff reduction. Latest natural gas transmission tariffs are published on the NRA and/or TSO websites in every October or every January, depending on the beginning of the gas year or the regulatory period. Thus in every December (seeing the October changes and most of the provisions for January) we have a look at new transmission tariff levels. This year the process was particularly interesting, as recent market developments had a significant effect on natural gas transmission.