Energy minister Arvydas Sekmokas said investment in Visaginas will not be influeced by proposed nuclear power plants in Belarus and the Kaliningrad exclave.

RIGA — Lithuanian Minister of Energy Arvydas Sekmokas said at an energy investment convention yesterday that Russian and Belarusian plans to build two nuclear power plants won’t stop the Visaginas project.

Russia is set to build a nuclear power plant this year in the Kaliningrad exclave, squeezed between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. Meanwhile Belarus is seeking to build a nuclear power plant, too and both may come online before the Visaginas starts operating in 2016.

Despite the competition from east and west, Sekmokas told the audience at the Euroconvention Baltic States Infrastructure & New Energy Investment and Finance Summit in Riga Wednesday that the hunt for investors for the Visaginas plant was not being hampered.

“Kaliningrad is more of a military zone,” Sekmokas said. “Of course it’s up to Russia to invest … we are developing our own project.”

Sekmokas mentioned that the Baltic power grid may not be able to handle the Kaliningrad plant’s electric input. Given Kaliningrad’s geographic location, Lithuania and Poland could cut the plant off, wasting its capacity.

“There are no power links in place,” Sekmokas said about the Kaliningrad plant and the Baltic power grid.

No LEO LT repeat

Sekmokas also assured investors that the Visaginas project would not end up like the LEO LT project, which was set up by the previous Lithuanian government but dismantled by the current one. Although the opposition is currently leading in opinion polls over the parties of the center-right ruling coalition, Sekmokas said if his government was swept out of power this fall no radical changes to the Visaginas project would be instituted.

“It should be binding both ways,” Sekmokas said. “This is a matter of security and supply.”

Sekmokas emphasized that since NDX Energija was reimbursed for its investment in LEO LT, private investors in Visaginas should not worry about losing their funds.