Hive is currently actively developing solar projects in 15 countries, including Serbia.
Earlier this year, we announced that two of our projects in the region reached milestones as our pipeline in the region reached 2.2 GW.
Serbia is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with around 65% of all power being sourced from coal. While coal is still prevalent in the region, Serbia is planning to quickly grow its renewable power sources, with hopes to reduce fossil fuels to 25% by 2030 (vs 2019). So, Hive’s substantial photovoltaic portfolio will massively bolster the PV supply in the country.
New Legislations across Serbia
Serbia adopted a new set of rules for grid connection applications for renewable energy projects in 2023.
Government regulations now permit developers to submit grid connection requests twice a year on projects more than 10 MWs. The first deadline was December 1st, following the TSO publishing instructions on November 13th. In Serbia, the majority of applications are for wind developments, rather than solar. Meaning Hive’s projects will play an important role in PV adoption and growth.
Hive Serbia’s projects
For the December 1st deadline, we submitted four solar projects to TSO.
The projects range from 40 to 65 MW and have been submitted with accompanying battery storage proposals. All four of the projects were submitted with expected operational dates in 2025. So far, all the projects have passed the TSO documentation check and we have received draft contracts. The next step in the process is to wait for the grid studies from the TSO, which will be delivered on April 22, 2024. Once the TSO grid connection is officially approved, we will be able to progress four sites, with a total capacity of 205 MW.
Our most advanced projects in the region, Pirot and Prokuplje, have completed final detail regulation planning and spatial plans will be submitted to local municipalities for approval in January. We have already secured the land for these two sites.
A further two projects currently have on-going urbanism documents in progress, and we hope to adopt the final spatial plan for these two sites in June. We’ll share further updates on these sites around summer 2024 when we hope to have more good news.
Hive Serbia is preparing seven new project for second TSO cutoff that will start in March 2024.
