Ukraine is once again running the risk of meeting cold spells, frosts, and gas conflicts at the same time. Only this time the conflicts are “internal,” not “external.” Household heating facilities paid for just 78 percent of the consumed natural gas as of August 27. Their total debt to Haz Ukrainy, a subsidiary of the Naftohaz joint-stock company, is now more than 2.26 billion hryvnias.
The company says the heating facilities that have run up the heaviest gas debts are those of Donetsk (473 million hryvnias), Dnipropetrovsk (329 million hryvnias), Luhansk (267 million hryvnias), Kharkiv (223 million hryvnias), and Odesa (133 million hryvnias) oblasts, while the Kyiv based energy-consumption company Kyivenerho has incurred a debt of over 1.93 billion hryvnias to Haz Ukrainy, having paid 56 percent of the amount due in 2010.
Among the worst payers for the gas consumed since last October are the heating facilities of Luhansk (48 percent), Transcarpathian (52 percent), and Zhytomyr (62 percent) oblasts, and in Sevastopol (57 percent). By contrast, the heating facilities of Mykolaiv oblast have paid 100 percent, and those of Chernivtsi, Poltava, Cherkasy, and Lviv oblasts have paid 97, 96, 91, and 90 percent, respectively.
Haz Ukrainy is calling on all the household heating facilities of this country to follow the suit of their punctual counterparts. And, to speed up the “exchange of experience,” the gas company has urged governmental bodies to replace the management of some debt-incurring heating facilities. The managers of nine heat-supplying facilities have already exhausted the company’s patience. They have been dismissed in the past few months on Haz Ukrainy’s initiative. About twenty facilities are awaiting the same fate.
The Haz Ukrainy’s website says that if a heating facility has run up a debt for the gas consumed since October 1, 2009, the company will not sign a contract with it on the supply of gas in the 2010-11 heating season, nor will it actually deliver the planned quantity of gas to them.
Meanwhile, prices for heat supplies will soon rise, even though a considerable part of the population may not receive it, Hryhorii Semchuk, First Deputy Minister for Public Utilities, announced. “Heat supply rates in Ukraine are expected to rise by an average 29.7 percent,” he said in a Verkhovna Rada speech on social security measures in connection with new public utility rates.
Semchuk emphasized that this hike was exclusively caused by the fact that the gas share in the net cost of 1 hecto-calorie of heat has risen from 179 to 232 hryvnias. However, according to the deputy minister, the increased heat supply rates will not fully compensate for the production of heat and hot water — it will only raise its share in the net cost to 79 percent.
