KRASNOYARSK. Feb 28 (Interfax) - Russia's Energy Ministry discussed the latest regulatory proposals and changes on the energy market with representatives of power companies, investors and market players at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum. They discussed retiring old generating equipment, extending the duration of capacity supply agreements (CSA), as well as the development of distributed generation in Russia.

E.ON Russia CEO Maxim Shirokov shared his views on the latest proposals, the development of decentralized generation, as well as the connection between the recently concluded Sochi Olympics and the future of the energy market in an interview with Interfax.

Q: What are the company's plans for the development of its new area of business - distributed generation? What projects does E.ON want to be a part of?

A: There is in fact such an agenda. We estimate annual commissioning for distributed generation at around 500 MW, if not more. And the problem is that it is poorly factored into the system. On one hand the development of distributed generation is consumers' departure from centralized generation and pressure in the system on those who remain increases. This is obvious. On the other hand, this is a trend, a global tendency and we can't get away from it. To be fair, it should be said that distributed generation has been around for a very long time, there's nothing new in this. Industrial consumers have always tried to solve their problems on their own somehow. I, for example, worked on this in the early 2000s at Uralkali . I also created some alternative capacity there. We've decided for ourselves to participate in this market. I can't say now that in some year we'll do this much. For us the main thing now is to correctly test the approach. In other words, correctly test the model.

Q: On what projects do you plan to fine-tune your model?

A: We've bought part of a project for an industrial zone not far from Moscow from DEGA. There are two turbines there, DEGA understands what to do with them, but they clearly lack the competencies that we possess. We'll see what happens next. I would not like to name specific clients right now.

Q: What about the Rosneft tender?

A: That's a first stab. The tender there is for design, the costs are negligible. We simply decided to see for ourselves what a tender is like, we've never participated in them. We entered this thing at a fairly late stage.

Q: You've said that 2014 will be a difficult year for the company - the freeze on natural monopoly tariffs, the tariff set for the Berezovskaya GRES power plant following 2014 competitive capacity offtake in Siberia