Economy and Sustainable Development Minister Tomislav Coric said on Thursday the government would do its best to make the increase in gas and electricity prices as of April 2022 as small as possible, noting however that those prices would definitely go up.

Coric made the statement after a government session in a comment on a government regulation adopted at today’s session on the share of preferred producers in the net electricity supplied which power providers are obliged to take over from the power market operator.

Coric said the share the HROTE energy market operator purchases from producers will thus increase from 40% to 60%. We are talking about a fixed price and HROTE will thus be enabled to help avoid, by delivering more electricity to providers at a lower price, an excessive increase in electricity prices, he said.

“The European and world markets have seen energy prices explode, oil, gas and electricity prices alike. This is one of the tools helping us keep in advance the price of electricity within a normal range in the spring of 2022,” said Coric.

He said this was the government’s way of avoiding a major price hike as experienced by a number of European countries in recent weeks and months.

Coric said he could not speculate about how much the price of electricity would go up, noting that it would depend on the price of electricity in the coming months as well as the hydrological conditions in Croatia.

He noted that until now a significant shock in terms of price hikes had been avoided in the household sector and that the government would do its best to cushion the shock of rising electricity and gas prices for the business sector as much as possible beyond April

Coric also pointed to a government regulation adopted today that would integrate the 170 existing water suppliers into 41 to consolidate their financial, administrative and personnel capacity and facilitate the implementation of water infrastructure projects. The value of those projects in the next ten years exceeds 58 billion kuna, he said.