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Greek state-owned power utility Public Power Corporation (PPC) has received no binding bid for the sale of three coal-fired power plants that it is selling under a post-bailout agreement with its international lenders. The sale included two lignite-fired power units in Megalopoli (unit 3 & 4, 255 MW each, southern Peloponnese) and the lignite-fired power plant in Meliti (289 MW, northern Greece), which correspond to 40% of PPC’s coal-fired capacity.. The sale also included a license for the construction of a second power unit in Meliti.

The sale process has been repeatedly pushed back since the tender was launched in 2018. PPC rejected two bids in February 2019 considering that they were not satisfactory and relaunched the sale process in March 2019, attracting expressions of interest (EoIs) from 6 companies, namely Beijing Guohua and Damco Energy, China Western Power Industrial, Sev.En Energy and Indoverse Coal Investments, Gek Terna, ElvalChalkor and eventually Mytilinaios Group.

The new government that took office in early July 2019 may not relaunch the sale process for these plants and will work on a plan to help PPC, which is struggling with more than €2.4bn of arrears from unpaid bills since the economic crisis of 2009.

According to the Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) released by the US  Energy Information Administration (EIA), energy-related CO2 emissions in the United States are expected to reverse their 2018 trend (+3%) and to decline by 2.2% in 2019. Energy-related CO2 emissions would decrease by 114 Mt in 2019 and most of the drop would come from coal-related emissions (-13%, i.e.

According to the latest carbon inventory submitted by the Chinese Ministry of Environment to the United Nations, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in China rose by more than 53% between 2005 and 2014, reaching 12.3 GtCO2eq in 2014.

The Islamic Development Bank (IDB) has approved a US$100m soft loan to the government of Mozambique for the construction of a 400 kV power transmission line between Temane in the Inhambane province and the capital city Maputo.

The gas platform for the Leviathan giant offshore gas project in Israel is being shipped from Texas (United States) to the Israel coast and is expected to be installed in September 2019. Once assembled, Noble Energy will start a series of commissioning tests, with the aim of beginning commercial gas flows to the Israeli gas market by the end of 2019. …

Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Armenian National Interests Fund (ANIF) to collaborate in developing 500 MW of renewable power projects. Masdar aims to develop 200 MW of solar PV projects, 200 MW of onshore wind projects and 100 MW of floating solar power projects in Armenia. ….

The General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL) has connected the fourth 160 MW unit of the 640 MW Ubari power plant to the national grid. The unit was first commissioned in October 2017 and ran on crude oil. The unit has now been converted to natural gas.

The Ministry of Energy of Uzbekistan has decided to build four nuclear reactors, instead of the two initially planned.