The meeting of ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia has not been scheduled yet.
“Consultations are being held at the level of experts and involve the representatives of the companies and experts from the ministries. The date of the ministers’ meeting has not been established yet,” Daiva Rimašauskaitė, an adviser to the energy minister, told BNS.
Consultations were launched as a follow-up to the government’s decision, she added.
As decided by the Cabinet, if the parties were to agree to proceed with the project together, a decision on the establishment of a joint venture for the implementation of this project would be taken by October 1.
After the working group, set up by Butkevičius' government, has found that the nuclear power project is too expensive for Lithuania and that the price of electricity generated at the new facility may be non-competitive, the authorities say that the project could only be continued if its terms were improved through talks with Latvian and Estonian energy companies and Japan's Hitachi.
Guenther Oettinger, the European Union‘s Energy Commissioner, said last Friday that it was up to the Lithuanian government to decide whether the country should build a new nuclear facility. He noted, however, that the country alone was too small for the project.
He called on Vilnius to discuss this issue with Latvia, Estonia, Poland and to create a common electricity market.
