Building Energy, a multinational company operating as Global Integrated IPP in the renewable energy sector, has partnered with City of Krusevac to construct a biomass power plant in Krusevac, in Central Serbia.
The plant, the first one in the Country combining electric and thermal energy, will have an installed capacity of respectively 4.8MWe and 20MWt and will generate 38.4GWh of electric power and 86GWh of thermal power per year, the company said.
The development of the project, worth 27 million euro, starts from a memorandum of understanding signed between Building Energy and the City of Krusevac, which provides for a close collaboration for the creation of an electricity generation pole from renewable sources.
The plant will be fuelled by woodchips coming from the cleaning of Serbian woods.
The sale of thermal energy, resulting from a ten-year agreement between Building Energy and the Krusevac thermal power plant, will largely contribute to satisfy the thermal needs of the city, which has about 110,000 inhabitants.
The sale of electric power, instead, will be regulated by a contract with the national utility operator EPS, according to the Serbian feed-in-tariff rules.
The project will create 70 new jobs in the territory during the plant construction, and 40 more positions, between specialized staff and workers, for the plant management and maintenance activities. In addition to these, other jobs will be created from satellite activities, such as the woods cleaning and the biomass transportation to the plant.
The territory will also benefit in terms of CO2 savings, around 38,400 tons per year, achieved through both higher cycle efficiency and the reduction in the use of carbon as the energy source of the current teleheating.
The electrical and thermal power production is expected to start from the winter of 2017/2018.
Rajani Baburajan