„Nenskra Hydro” meets all international standards, and employment of the local population is one of the priorities for our company. The local labour force is going to be employed to work both at the operational and construction stages”, said to the radio station “Commersant” Teimuraz Kopadze, Chief Operations Officer of “Nenskra Hydro”.
„Nenskra Hydro” is planned to be constructed on the river Nenskra in Chuberi gorge of Svaneti region. With 280 MW of installed capacity, the HPP will generate additional 1,200 000 000 kWh of electricity a year. A range of details was considered at the design stage that included the consumption regimes of Georgia’s electricity market. “Nenskra Hydro” is designed to generate electricity during power shortage winter season. For this reason specifically, the hydro power plant was planned to be equipped with a high dam reservoir with the surface area of around 4 km2. To compare, the surface area of “Enguri” HPP is 15 km2. In this context, our HPP is small but in terms of generation, it will considerably contribute to supply Georgia with electricity”, - says Teimuraz Kopadze.
With regard to the profile of the HPP, according to Mr. Kopadze, it is designed to take into account the concerns of the local community in terms of the future impact. “Consequently, the current location of the HPP is 7 km away from the nearest settlement, and the impact on the community is reduced to a minimum. In addition, as a result of an engineering decision, the following scheme is going to be accepted: additional water will be diverted into the Nenskra Hydro reservoir from the river Nakra from the gorge that is parallel with the river Nenskra. This will further improve Nenskra’s generation capacities”, - explains the Chief Operations Officer of “Nenskra Hydro”.
“The work on the project started as early as in 2011-2012 and it went through a long way of studies, designing, compliance with standards including various international financial institutions and their standards. Now we have a final project – “Nenskra Hydro” meets all international standards and Georgians standards are naturally among them”, - stated Teimuraz Kopadaze on the air of the radio station “Commersant”.
According to him, currently preparatory works for Nenskra Hydro construction are being executed. This includes the arrangement of the access roads, bridges and infrastructure that are necessary to launch main works. The HPP is planned to be commissioned by 2025.
„The employment of the local population is one of the priorities for our company. The local labour force is going to be employed to work both at the operational and construction stages. At this stage, Georgian nationals are 100% employed. At least 90% out of them is local population. At the next stage, when a general contractor steps in and large scale works are launched, we will require of the general contractor to employ the local man power. This is one of the main articles of the terms and conditions of the tender.
Our company is a Korean water resources company, one of the largest in Korea. It manages the water distribution systems in Seoul and 16 HPPs within the territory of Korea alone. The company owns quite a long-time experience of building and operating hydro power plants in various countries.
It goes without saying that such a large company stands out for its high social responsibility. In this case, Georgia and this specific project are not going to be an exception either. The work on a range of social projects have been already started. The budget has been allocated and it includes various directions such as contribution to small business where the local community is going to be involved, tourism, various agricultural programs, and other legal entities. We are planning to offer the local community a number of training sessions and retraining workshops in 2019 in order to provide the general contractor at the construction stage with local skilled man power”, - says Teimuraz Kopadze
