Energy with mines – or a concrete wheel to the drowning man’s rescue 

Blocking coal imports – again, we will regulate a market that is not a market anyway.

Hard coal is filling up all available storage. Miners are working, but the power industry is not burning coal sufficiently (the weather is to blame because it was too warm and on top of that sunny, so photovoltaics blocked the work of other power plants). Millions of tons of coal are on the heaps, with power plants reporting that they have doubled their standard maximum stockpiles. There is too much coal – so a solution must be found immediately – the Ministry found one – by blocking imports. A rightly taken action in the name of defending the Polish national good; after all, a good few million tons of coal have already arrived from abroad, and this is only the end of the first quarter (given this, the import ban will improve the situation of mines and consumers). Admittedly, some people are reminded that two years ago, coal was bought from abroad on an intervention basis, and sometimes it is still lying in stockpiles – but that was different (intervention imports improved the situation of mines and consumers). Why did we import coal this year if the mines had a surplus? However, this is a politically and electorally incorrect question because we would have to immediately explain why Polish mines produce more expensive than foreign mines (and why this must be so). So the Ministry of Industry, as soon as it was constituted, got down to the business of solving the pressing (heap) mining problem in the best way we always know how – that is, by introducing regulation and an artificial market and looking for where to stuff the mine problem. A new idea has shown up in press statements – linking mines to power units. Admittedly, the coal power industry is in a state of collapse (or one could say sinking), production is declining in the face of RES competition, costs are high, and corporations dream of getting rid of it (the previous idea of NABE(National Energy Security Agency) – a kind of government coal generation centre with subsidies). Now, the NABE concept is going into a corner, and corporations have yet to adopt coal mines and integrate them with their generation. It’s a kind of “concrete lifebelt” that will sink the corporations (they already have problems with banks, liquidity and money for new necessary investments, and here they get additional billions in losses and still shy of the further idea that they might take away distribution on top of that). Not surprisingly, the market reacted in a market way (a sharp drop in prices); the CEOs of the corporations grabbed the phones and the very next day began to appear in denial that actually this idea (of a concrete circle) would be modified, however. For the time being, we will subsidize the mines separately. Another idea was left as a reward – coal imports abroad would be blocked. This is a solution that has been used many times – so it’s much better to block competition; maybe the conjuncture will improve – that is, there will be a higher price of coal, but so that it won’t be too high, because again we will have to import intervention. Even a little of that (prosperity) is happening because, with the impact of a container ship on a bridge in Baltimore, the largest U.S. coal export port was blocked (the Ministry denies having anything to do with it). So the national epic on coal continues, and all hope now is in the notification of the mine extinction program (which in its quintessential form includes subsidies for mining, which is crucial – they must be paid). Admittedly, in the meantime, the energy world is changing even faster than expected, and the drop in PV and storage prices are extreme; before long, the market will be flooded with PV power – which already has to be curtailed in production, and this will still eliminate coal even faster. The coal issue ceases to be even a topic for satirical reviews because it’s clear what will happen anyway – the piles will grow, miners will protest, subsidies will be notified, increased and paid, the competition market will be blocked, coal generation will collapse and queue up for subsidies. The Ministry of Industry, given the concentration of work on one issue, is planning to return to its name (it was in effect from 1949 to 1957) as the Ministry of Coal Mining. Now, it will probably take about the same amount of time to resolve the coal problem in Poland on its own.   

Somewhere, the 1.5 billion for oil purchase got lost… or a tiny 200,000 average salary. 

A rather hackneyed quote of unknown origin, “If to love is princesses if to steal are millions”, was creatively adapted by one of the oil suppliers to the Swiss subsidiary of a major energy company. At least it didn’t change princesses to royalty, but only millions to billions. This shows how money is rapidly devaluing in the modern world and that no one will bend over for change if you can get a billion immediately. Characteristically, however, for the public and our everyday understanding, a million has a more significant effect than a billion (an unimaginable sum). If someone embezzles, loses or simply loses millions – immediately outrage, but if he does the same with billions, it somehow does not make an impression.

Meanwhile, some comparisons are worthwhile (I once saw them in a lecture) – translationally, a million seconds is 11.5 days and a billion… 31 years. Lost money for the purchase of oil is approximately 200 thousand of the average national salary (that is, you have to work 16 thousand years for it) or, in other words, for a year, the population of Sandomierz, known from the TV series “Father Matthew”, has to work for it (if they earned national averages). It’s also about half of the expenses of the Ministry of Sports and Tourism – the one feeding our athletes or the possibility of buying 1,000 apartments (100 meters each) in the centre of Warsaw – so if we decided to do that, we would spend maybe ten days in each one over our lifetime. Such a sum has just been written off as a loss (so it won’t ultimately go to the state budget and other shareholders as dividends) because someone ordered oil (and paid) and didn’t receive it. Looking already at the oil – this advance is about 4 million barrels, or 636 million litres, or 0.5 million tons (we consume about 26 million tons annually). Finally, perhaps more pessimistically than entertainingly – it’s also 750,000 hours of work by the world’s top law firms – so you can be almost entirely sure that no one will be ultimately responsible for this deal.