The meeting of the Government of Georgia was held on November 24, 2009. The Agenda covered 21 items.
Prior to discussion of the Agenda items the Georgian Prime Minister Nika Gilauri focused upon the importance of the Namakhvan HPP.
"Namakhvan HPP is a very important matter for the economics of the country and promotion of investors. As you know, we published a list of all those hydropower plants, whereupon we wanted to conduct negotiations. Several companies contacted us. One of them was the South Korean company KEPKO, and the other one was the Turkish company NUROLI. We have been carrying negotiations with those two companies for almost one year. The negotiations concern the construction of Namakhvani coordinated hydroelectric system in Georgia. It is a 450 MW coordinated hydroelectric system consisting of 3 hydropower plants.
Today we are going to discuss the Memorandum of Agreement which will specify the major issues. If such Agreement is signed, and we hope this will happen in December, consortium of NORULI and KEPKO will be able to work out the final project of the mentioned HPP during a year and submit us the final plan at the end of the year, and from 2011 it may start the HPP construction. This is the most important project for the country, which in tote makes an investment of about 800 million USD. Thousands of people will be employed during the period. This is a 100% guarantee of energy security in Georgia in the future and a huge export potential. As you know, NUROLI is a Turkish company which uses a lot of electricity itself and the part of such electricity will be exported to Turkey. It will make our international balance of trade better", Nika Gilauri said and asked the Minister for Energetics to comment upon the issue.
According to Alexandre Khetaguri the electricity generated during winter will be used in Georgia, and in the other months our electricity export will be mainly made in the direction of Turkey.
Finally, the Prime Minister Nika Gilauri declared that the similar project in the field of energetics had never been implemented yet.
Press Office of the Prime Minister