German industrial giant Siemens and several Russian companies launched a joint venture Wednesday to modernize Russian electric power plants and produce control equipment for foreign markets.The new company, Interautomatika AG, will produce automatic control systems for Russian power plants, which are 10 to 15 years behind world standards in technology and environmental safety equipment, said Gurgen Olkhovsky, director of the Russian Heat Technology Institute, which owns 41 percent of the joint venture. Most of the production will take place at Russian factories."We are using strong Russian energy systems which are no worse than foreign ones, but our plants need to be improved in terms of environmental protection and control over the production," Olkhovsky said.Siemens owns 31 percent of the shares in the company, which was registered in January with a founding capital of 3 million Deutsche marks. Mosmatik, a joint venture between Siemens and the Moscow car producer AZLK, owns 5 percent, according to Lysko.Another 15 percent belongs to the export company Technopromeksport, and 8 percent is owned by a Russian company called ORGRES, Lysko said.Interautomatika Director Vladimir Lysko said the company already has received an order for the installation of an automatic control system at the Northwestern electric power plant, which is currently under construction near St. Petersburg. He said that Interautomatika is negotiating a similar contract with a power plant in Krasnodar in southern Russia which is likely to be signed within a month.The joint venture will also seek contracts to modernize plants in Russia and abroad using Russian-made equipment, said Hans Dieter Bott, Siemens' commercial director of automatic control systems."Siemens is not considering Russia only as a market for sales of its existing technologies," Bott said. "With the help of our partners we will be able to put together the existing Russian equipment and our technologies to make competitive equipment for foreign markets."Siemens now has eight joint ventures in Russia, including Interautomatika, said Robert Schmid, head of the Siemens representation in Moscow.