"Since this is an analysis conducted by a specific consulting company, its content belongs to that company, and it is not something that the Ministry of Climate can share in full detail," said Rein Vaks, head of the ministry's energy department, during a public discussion in the Riigikogu's special committee on budget control regarding the government's planned energy policy on Wednesday.

Vaks explained the analysis, conducted by EA Energy, took into account the current state of the electricity systems in 18 countries, future forecasts, and 42 different scenarios.

"In other words, the content is highly technical and detailed. The memorandum, the summary that the committee has received, is exactly that — a summary of the entire calculation and principle, with references to specific figures that we have used in our own analyses," he said, referring to the brief summary of the analysis that was provided to the committee.

Vaks confirmed the ministry has access to the contents of the model, officials have reviewed it, and they have verified that the results align with the explanations provided by the model's creators.

"The reason why we have not been able to make this material public is simply that it contains data that are the intellectual property of EA Energy, which they have collected from around the world and which are part of their business model. We cannot distribute these data publicly, as they are part of their business processes," said the head of the ministry's energy department.

The analysis was commissioned from EA Energy by Estonia's system operator, Elering, in 2022.

The official explained it was used because, at the time, the government had requested an assessment of how offshore wind would impact electricity prices.

"To obtain these calculations ourselves, the ministry would have needed more than a year, including procurement processes, meaning we could not have commissioned the analysis at that time. We used the materials available at Elering at that moment — various price forecasts, different models — and based on these, from this 2022 analysis, we gained indications about price scenarios, which we then used as a basis for subsequent actions," Vaks outlined.

He stressed the analysis does not focus solely on offshore wind but presents 42 possible scenarios for how electricity prices could evolve on the market with the addition of various capacities to the system.

In January, following lengthy debates, heads of the three coalition parties (Reform, SDE and Eesti 200) decided to support a renewable energy development scheme, which will see Estonia subsidize 2 TWh of onshore and 2TWh of offshore wind power. The latter is 10 times more costly to develop.

According to the coalition's agreement, Estonia is willing to pay offshore wind developers a total of €2.6 billion in subsidies for whenever the market price of electricity falls below €65/MWh.

The coalition has so far failed to produce calculations to demonstrate how this would ensure promised cheaper energy prices or what it's forecast of Estonia seeing a major boost in energy consumption over the next decade is based on.

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