Energy, Good for Business, Lithuania, Technology

"We have to evaluate market opportunities and carry out environmental impact assessment from 2017 until 2020," the minister told.

In his words, the Lithuanian government is due to make decisions paving the way for calling tenders in 2020, and the tenders can be expected in 2021-2022.

"I would also like to underline that we have to be open to regional cooperation initiatives. (…). Regional countries, be it Latvia or Estonia, will have to sit down at the table and think on whether it would be rational to implement regional plans," Vaiciunas said.

Last year, the minister said he had offered major European wind energy companies, including Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, Enercon and Vatenfall, to invest in Lithuania but the country would interest the foreign companies as part of a wider region as several hundred megawatts for one country is too expensive, Vaiciunas said.

On the other hand, he added, Lithuanian should, first of all, make use of the wind energy potential onshore. An additional quota of 250MW is planned for wind farms in Lithuania by 2020 (the existing 500MW quota has already been used), and this type of energy will become the main in Lithuania.

There's not a single wind farm in Lithuania's territorial waters in the Baltic Sea at the moment.