SKOPJE, April 20 (Reuters) – Western Balkan countries are seeing a boom in investment in solar power, which could help ease an energy crisis that threatened to shift away from coal, but industry officials say transmission systems are not prepared for new energy sources.
North Macedonia’s Economy Minister Kreshnik Bekteshi said investors had started investing “quite furiously” in solar power plants and his country, an electricity importer, had become a regional hub for renewable energy sources.
Since 2021, solar farms with a capacity of 139 megawatts (MW) have been built while up to 300 MW of new solar power is expected to be produced by the end of 2023, enough to power eight cities, said Marko Bislimovski, the president. of the Energy Regulatory Commission of North Macedonia.
However, transmission and distribution networks are not prepared to absorb such sudden influxes of solar energy and must expand to accept and balance energy generated only during daylight, he said. he declares.
“Our network can enable the transmission of around 1,300 MW of photovoltaic energy and the distribution network has a capacity of 700 to 800 MW while there is a transmission plan of 5,000 MW,” Bislimovski said. “So we have problems.”
The other solution, although expensive, is to store electricity. The legislation has therefore been amended to require investors to guarantee the storage of electricity by batteries in areas where the network is already reserved.
(1/5)Workers install solar panels on an office building in Skopje, North Macedonia on April 19,2023. REUTERS/Ognen Teofilovski Acquire license rights
Certified solar panel producers further warn that poor monitoring of companies installing unlicensed solar panels amid growing demand causes technical problems and can cause enormous damage to the energy system.
“People focus on the price and how quickly the work will be completed, without thinking about the large-scale consequences for both investors and the network,” said Goran Paunov, owner and general director of KMG EOL Kvazar, a solar panel company based in Skopje. producer.
Solar power plants have also proliferated in Bosnia, the only Balkan country exporting electricity, particularly in the southern region of Herzegovina. Stolac, the town that pioneered the use of solar energy 12 years ago, has now become a major construction site.
“We are planning a solar power generation capacity of up to 600 MW,” said Stolac Mayor Stjepan Boskovic, cautioning however that the project depends on the capacity of transmission lines and the willingness of energy agencies. State to extend it accordingly.
Boskovic said private and state-owned companies had bid for projects worth around 1 billion Bosnian marks ($559 million) in the region.
($1 = 1.789 Bosnian marks)
Additional reporting and writing by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise
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