State Management of Energy Saving in Industrial Regions of Russia: Tariff Regulation

Energy saving and sustainability is a key state policy in the Russian Federation in the field of industrial development. The research featured the electricity consumption patterns in the Irkutsk Region, Siberian Federal District. Statistic, cluster, and data synthesis analyses made it possible to conduct a comparative study of the energy efficiency in Russia against other countries, federal districts, and regions as based on gross domestic (GDP) and regional (GRP) products. The Irkutsk energy system involved the prices of electricity supply to industrial consumers, the structure of electricity consumption, and the volume of energy consumption by the population and equivalent consumer categories. The main patterns that resulted in the low electricity sustainability in the region included a high share of electricity consumption by the population (17%), the low electricity tariffs for the population, and the high absolute indicators of electricity consumption per capita. The tariffs for electricity supplied to the population are low, compared to the tariffs for industrial consumers. It encourages electricity industrial consumers to claim tariffs for the population, which allows them to save on electricity bills. To level the economic situation in the Irkutsk Region, harmonize prices, and optimize consumer groups of electricity users, the authors propose to increase tariffs for electricity to all equivalent consumer categories.