The Social Democrats appealed to VERT regarding ESO’s “systematic abuse of its position” | Business

In response to the recent resurgence of reports about ESO’s conflicts with customers, the Social Democrats call on VERT to immediately “take up the moderation of relations between the state network operator and consumers”.

“The scandals about the possibly non-transparent ESO pricing continue. The currently valid procedure for connecting to the electricity grid is not transparent, the principles of pricing are unclear, which creates conditions for abuse or even possible fraud”, warns Social Democrat Gintautas Paluckas, vice-chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Seimas.

The parliamentarian is surprised that the ESO sets very different prices, tends to manipulate access to information that allows us to understand how the price is set.

Some “peel” more than others

“In fact, ESO “extracts” more money from some users than from others. We found out that sometimes ESO applies less than 50% for some reason. a capacity development fee reaching the value of the project.

Our question to the grid operator and the energy regulator is simple: why can’t consumers planning expansion know in advance at least an approximate connection fee? Why isn’t there a database or a map that would allow users to familiarize themselves in advance with the possible costs of the development of the electricity network in a specific municipality?” – asks Social Democrat member of the Seimas G. Paluckas.

Addressing VERT, the Social Democrats ask for an answer as to how often ESO applies less than 50 percent. project value capacity development fee, connecting new projects to networks; for what proportion of new users who have been granted access to the network, a significant part of their connection costs have been covered by ESO itself. The authors of the petition ask whether the social, economic and ecological impact criteria of the projects are applied, which would justify the application of a lower capacity development tax.

The attention of the LSDP faction was attracted by ESO’s conflict with Detalita UAB, which complained about the possibly non-transparent calculation of the costs of connecting to the electricity grid, as well as ESO’s self-service failures and other incidents.