Lithuania's parliament on Thursday approved a deal with Japan's Hitachi on the construction of a new nuclear plant aimed at reducing the Baltic state's energy dependence on Russia.

Last July, Lithuania invited Hitachi in alliance with General Electric to start talks on building a plant, rejecting a bid by the US-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corporation.

The Hitachi package was approved Thursday with 69 votes in favour, two votes against and three abstentions but with most opposition lawmakers in the 141-seat parliament boycotting the vote altogether.

The value of the investment is put at up to 5.0 billion euros ($6.3 billion) and the plant is expected to generate 1,350 megawatts from 2020-2022.

Construction is expected to start in 2015.

Hitachi group will get a 20 percent stake in the project. Lithuania will hold 38 percent, while fellow Baltic states Estonia and Latvia will control 22 and 20 percent respectively though contractual details are still being ironed out.

The new Visaginas power plant is set to replace a Soviet-era facility, closed in 2009 under the terms of Lithuania's 2004 EU entry deal.

The old Ignalina plant provided 70 percent of Lithuania's electricity. Today the country imports over 60 percent of its electricity, mostly from Russia, which is also its sole gas supplier.

"The billions that Lithuania pays every year for imported electricity and gas to produce electricity will stay in our country," Rokas Zilinskas of the governing conservatives told parliament Thursday.

Facing a general election in October which polls show could favour the social democratic opposition, the center-right government insists the project will boost the economy and create 6,000 jobs.

Social democrats blasted the move, insisting the deal was more advantageous to Hitachi than to Lithuania and will push country into debt.

"The world now turns on green energy. Lithuania could also choose this way," social democrat Birute Vesaite said.

Lithuania is also planning to hook into the power grids of Sweden and neighbor Poland by the end of 2015.

The Baltic nation of three million joined European Union and NATO in 2004, 14 years after it split from the Soviet Union.