Hive Energy has been working in Serbia since 2021 when Bojan Bajceta joined the team as Regional Manager of South East Europe. Over the past two years, Bojan has been growing our pipeline in the country, which now consists of 17 PV projects with a total power capacity of over 2.2 GW.
Serbia’s renewable energy strategy
The projects will support Serbia’s green energy transition. Serbia is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with oil and coal accounting for around 2/3 of its annual supply (around 70%). While hydro plants account for a significant percent of the country’s power generation, renewable sources, including wind and solar, make up less than 3%.
Graph and data: International Energy Agency (2022), World Energy Outlook 2022, IEA – https://www.iea.org/countries/serbia
Serbia recently announced plans to reduce its use of coal in power generation by 25% by 2030, in comparison to 2019. In line with this change, renewably sourced power is planned to increase by 33% in the same period, compared to 1990 levels.
As well as the country’s plans to significantly grow clean energy, Serbia has laid out plans to modernise its overall power network. The network reconstruction will reduce power outages and costs while increasing reliability and distribution capabilities.
Hive’s Serbian solar projects
In recent months, we have progressed four of our projects – securing the sites with a total capacity of 490 MW. Bojan expects to secure additional land in the next few months, bringing our secured pipeline in Serbia to 780 MW by the end of the year.
We have undertaken all grid, environment, and planning pre-checks on the Pirot and Prokuplje projects and we have recently secured the land. Both projects have had leases officially noted and spatial plan change procedures have been initiated. Our initiatives for spatial plan change were adopted by municipality assemblies in Prokuplje and Pirot. We have since moved forward with procedure and reach spatial plan early insight and we are working on strategic environmental impact study in parallel.
Grid applications have already been submitted to EMS (the transport system operator in Serbia).
Pirot: The first location is Pirot, a 50 MW fixed mount PV project that will be built over around 53 hectares of agricultural land, owned by private company.
Prokuplje: The second project that we have secured is Prokuplje, a 40 MW fixed mount PV site that will be constructed on just over 47 hectares of land owned by the municipality of Prokuplje.
