Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at meeting with workers at new Gas Network Maintenance Centre in Fier: 

 

I would like to extend a warm welcome to our friends, the Deputy Chief of mission and other foreign friends, to this new centre of knowhow and work, where thanks to a well-designed process a group of 36 young people, recently graduated students, who are now deployed to the front of a sector that has yet to develop in Albania.

We have ushered in a very interesting and inspiring stage of development of the energy sector in all aspects also thanks to an extremely welcome innovation that is closely related to the European Union’s great development plan for our region with massive financial support from the EU, with development of energy sector and priority investments, including investments in gas sector, being one of the plan’s key pillars. This investment in gas sector in our region is related to Albania, because Albania, as your presence here indicates, has now a precious available asset like the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, from which we are seeking – and this goal now takes more concrete shape – to extend the gas distribution network, not only in our territory, but also through the region. 

Our goal is that together with some other countries in the region we build also the Adriatic-Ionian gas pipeline. This pipeline represents a great change to the space we live today and with the EU’s comprehensive economic and investment plan it provides a real opportunity, as it actually is, to expand the gas supply network to households and businesses throughout the territory, helping to significantly cut the electricity cost and, on the other hand, the opportunity to further extend the pipeline to Kosovo and other countries.

We have recently finalized a very beautiful and successful process on construction of the first photovoltaic park in Albania. It is the largest solar and renewable energy park in our region. Earlier today, in an online ceremony, we signed the Memorandum of Cooperation with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where the participants also highlighted this important success of our government in taking an initial step. We are now preparing to take the next step towards another important solar energy park in the Durrës area. 

Likewise, we have also signed an agreement with the U.S. government to construct the Skavica hydropower plant, a decades-long dreamed project which will provide us the opportunity so that we waste not a single drop of water intended for electricity generation, so that we no longer worry about the potential floods triggered anytime the dam gates open to discharge water in case of torrential rain that overflow the water reservoirs along the cascade.

With gas, hydropower and the solar energy we significantly diversify the energy portfolio, remaining part of the joint European platform for renewable clear energy, which provides us an additional advantage in terms of our potential, since a considerable part of electricity in the region is generated through the use of coal and fossil fuel, on which the European Union has issues directives and has adopted very aggressive objectives on the path towards clean energy.

You join this front precisely at the starting point of a fresh beginning towards a great change. I believe you are fully aware that joining this front offers you a number of optimum conditions and opportunities to grow professionally. Our cooperation with the Italian company is a strategic cooperation, very important in terms of knowhow, in terms of enhancing our capacity in an area that is largely new and unknown to us and where we have set up the company Albgaz, which is being consolidated and we are really very motivated to move forward as fast as we can.

I wish you all much success in this new adventure of your life and I very much wish your example becomes an inspiration to many others. While surely, this sector will offer us have many more opportunities for new jobs that require knowhow, skills, jobs for specialists, jobs that, as shown by the creation of this new team, are up for everyone who want to lead a career, based on the great investment they have made to graduate in this field and definitely on the passion to move forward and become as skilled and necessary as possible.

Thank you very much!