Croatia

Zvonimir Meštrović, head of solar business development at Croatian energy company ENCRO, tells pv magazine that sunny days and an ideal political climate set the Balkan country up to harvest large volumes of solar. However, he says bureaucratic red tape is weighing down the industry.

Croatia is preparing to build Eastern Europe’s largest energy storage project. IE Energy has secured €19.8 million ($20.9 million) to develop a 50 MW storage system, potentially extendable to 110 MW by 2024.

Croatia’s latest procurement exercise was significantly undersubscribed, with only 150 MW of submitted projects. The selected installations will be awarded 12-year feed-in premium contracts, but they will have to start delivering electricity by 2024.

A proposal to build a 950 MW solar facility has been submitted to the Croatian authorities by El Sun Energy d.o.o. The solar park is planned to be located in the county of Šibenik-Knin in southern Croatia.

The Croatian authorities plan to auction off 300MW of PV, 300MW of wind, 8MW of biomass and biogas, 4MW of small hydropower, and 10MW of geothermal power.

Petrol Group is investing €17 million in the construction of three solar parks in Knin, southern Croatia. The facilities will start producing electricity at the beginning of 2023.

The €7.4 million scheme is being financed through the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism 2014-2021. Rebates will cover up to 85% of the costs for buying and installing a PV system.

The procurement exercise will be the country’s second attempt to support large-scale solar and wind. The first 88 MW auction launched last year saw the allocation of just 25.5 MW. Solar secured 13.4 MW at an average price of $0.093/kWh. Selected PV projects range in size from 50 to 500 kW.

The Croatian energy regulator is seeking to allocate 88 MW of renewable energy generation capacity. The tender is part of the country’s plan to procure 2.26 GW of renewables including more than 1 GW of solar.

The 6.5 MW solar project will be built with PV modules supplied by Croatian manufacturer Solvis d.o.o.