Almost unnoticed - and very well that it was so - a year has passed since the early morning of February 8, 2025, when the disconnection of the Baltic States from the common power grid of Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, known by the acronym BRELL, began, writes Latvijas Avīze.
Just a day later, on February 9, this process was completed with the synchronization and connection to the continental European power grid. To ensure that the transition went as smoothly and painlessly as possible for consumers, the Baltic States and the European Union had been conducting systematic preparatory work since 2009, particularly intensively after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Now, a year later, without any significant problems in electricity supply and transmission network operations, it can be confidently stated that the Baltic States demonstrated the ability to flawlessly implement a project that is both technically and organizationally extremely complex. Liga Rozentale, Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Climate and Energy for Energy Policy, assesses the results as follows:
"The year after the disconnection of the Baltic electricity system from the BRELL ring can, in my opinion, be considered very successful, although legally only a few months have passed since the disconnection. Formally, the process was completed last autumn when battery systems with capacities of 20 and 60 megawatts for energy storage and system balancing were put into operation in Tume and Rezekne. Previously, such balancing reserves were provided to us by Russia; now we are creating them ourselves, as required by EU regulations."
Rozentale added that the battery system in Rezekne was 100% funded by the EU fund "RepowerEU," while the system in Tume was 75% financed by the European Connecting Europe Facility. After these capacities were introduced, the costs for balancing the electricity grid in Latvia significantly decreased.
Throughout the year, the operation of the electricity system remained stable, with no unplanned outages recorded, despite several instances of damage to undersea power cables between Estonia and Finland. This indicates a high level of preparedness among the transmission operators of all three Baltic States for crisis situations.
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