Company briefs - 2010-02-10

  • 2010-02-10

Ryanair announced it would open a base in Kaunas, its first in Central Europe, in May this year, reports ELTA. From Lithuania’s second largest city Ryanair will offer customers 18 routes. Kaunas Airport will operate flights to Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Edinburgh, London, Milan, Oslo, Paris and Tampere. The airline will invest over 140 million dollars in the new Kaunas base, which will sustain around 1,000 jobs with over 120 weekly flights. Ryanair also confirmed that it is negotiating with four other Central European airports to open bases and give customers a larger choice and much lower fares than “the high fares being charged by airBaltic and other airlines of Central Europe.”

Eesti Energia’s subsidiary Tehnoloogiatoostus is planning to establish a heat and power plant in Johvi. The expected investment involved is nearly 250 million kroons (16 million euros), reports Postimees. The peat-fuelled heat and power plant with a capacity of up to 20 MW is planned to be launched in summer 2012. The plant will be used mostly for the company’s own energy needs. The company would consume more than half of the heating energy and approximately a quarter of the electricity itself, with the rest sold to the grid. The new plant would use 60,000 – 70,000 tons of peat a year. The company says that at today’s fuel prices, peat leads to the lowest cost energy.
 
The head of Estonian state-owned railway cargo transport company Eesti Raudtee Kaido Simmermann said that with Estonian cargo transport in mind, the width of the rail tracks should not be changed, reports National Broadcasting. “There is some point in it for passenger transport but for cargo transport, where the main direction is East-West, not North-South, it would ruin our business.” Although the economic crisis has reduced cargo transport everywhere, Simmermann says that there is plenty of cargo. “We see trucks lined up at the border. We just have to offer them a better and cheaper service,” he said.