NEWS Kosovo must do more for renewables, European Union says

April 27, 2017, PV News.

Koso­vo must do more for renew­ables, Euro­pean Union says

Cit­ing a RAEL study, authored by Noah Kit­tner and Daniel Kam­men along with col­leagues from KOSID in Koso­vo, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion has said that Kosovo’s gov­ern­ment needs to increase efforts to improve its ener­gy sys­tem, and to pro­vide more sup­port for renew­ables, although it has recent­ly revised its ener­gy (and renew­able ener­gy) strat­e­gy up to 2020.

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

 

The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (EC) has said that Koso­vo should make more invest­ments in the ener­gy sec­tor, and add fur­ther gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty from both ther­mal and renew­able ener­gy sources, in order to become able to plan the decom­mis­sion­ing of the country’s two coal pow­er plants, which cur­rent­ly still cov­er almost all of its pow­er demand.

In the report on Kosovo’s Eco­nom­ic Reform Pro­gramme for the peri­od 2017–2019, pub­lished on the web­site of the Aus­tri­an Par­lia­ment, the EC said that the ener­gy reforms recent­ly imple­ment­ed by the local gov­ern­ment are not suf­fi­cient to improve the country’s trou­bled pow­er mar­ket, which still relies heav­i­ly on coal and elec­tric­i­ty imports.

Under its long-term ener­gy strat­e­gy, which was approved last sum­mer, Koso­vo is expect­ed to add 240 MW of pow­er gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty from renew­ables, of which only 10 MW is for solar PV, while wind and bio­mass will account for 150 MW and 14 MW, respec­tive­ly, with oth­er renew­able sources account­ing for the remain­ing share.

Despite these plans, the local gov­ern­ment is cur­rent­ly putting most of its efforts in the con­struc­tion of the new coal pow­er plant “Koso­va e Re”, an invest­ment that the EU itself con­sid­ers nec­es­sary to replace the 40-year old Koso­vo A Pow­er Sta­tion (345 MW) near Pristi­na, and upgrade the 27-year old lig­nite-fired Koso­vo B Pow­er Sta­tion (540 MW) in Obil­ić. The future Koso­vo Pow­er Project (600 MW), which is being backed by the World Bank, includes the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of the Koso­vo B pow­er plant, in order to bring it in com­pli­ance with EU standards.

Accord­ing to the EC, Kosovo’s ener­gy mar­ket suf­fers from the above-men­tioned out­dat­ed pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty, as well as low ener­gy effi­cien­cy, a non-lib­er­al­ized ener­gy mar­ket and a tar­iff sys­tem that does not reflect real costs. The EC added that it is not clear if recent reforms of the ener­gy mar­ket are aligned with the reforms includ­ed in the Ener­gy Strat­e­gy. “Progress in 2016”, the EC stressed, “was main­ly lim­it­ed to leg­isla­tive mea­sures and the intro­duc­tion of some ener­gy effi­cien­cy mea­sures.” The Com­mis­sion also stressed that cost esti­mates of the new planned actions for 2016, which include the future coal pow­er plant, three unspec­i­fied solar projects, 20 hydropow­er facil­i­ties and two wind pow­er instal­la­tions, “are very rough, and with­out a clear reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work.” The EC also spec­i­fied that all the work required by these actions was not done, except for the fea­si­bil­i­ty study for the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of Koso­vo B ther­mal pow­er plant.

Accord­ing to a report from Kosovo’s Min­istry of Ener­gy, solar had only a few hun­dred kW con­nect­ed to the grid as of the end of 2015. The first solar PV projects with total installed capac­i­ty of 102.4 kilo­watt were brought online in 2014. Under the FIT pro­gram run by the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture (MAFRD), 101 PV sys­tems total­ing 77 kW were installed in 2014, while fur­ther 135 instal­la­tions with a com­bined capac­i­ty of 364 kW came online in 2015.

Accord­ing to anoth­er report pub­lished in Envi­ron­men­tal Research Let­ters by sci­en­tists of Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley on the sci­en­tif­ic research jour­nal IOP­science last year, at the end of 2015 the coun­try had around 3 MW of solar installed under the FIT scheme, which was issued in 2014. The pro­gram is grant­i­ng a 12-year FIT of €85 ($92.5)/MWh.

A strik­ing aspect of Koso­vo is its sub­stan­tial solar ener­gy resource, yet com­plete lack of devel­op­ment of solar pow­er,” said the report’s authors. “It receives about 80% of Arizona’s solar inso­la­tion. That’s a high­er lev­el of sun­light than Ger­many, which has exten­sive solar ener­gy facil­i­ties.” Koso­vo, indeed, has a con­sid­er­able solar poten­tial with an aver­age of 278 sun­ny days and 2000 hours of sun per year.

The authors of IOPscience’s report also believe that dis­trib­uted renew­able and solar can bet­ter help Koso­vo man­age the nec­es­sary growth of installed gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty com­pared to large cen­tral­ized projects. While PV sys­tems can be installed incre­men­tal­ly on a per kW or MW scale, a coal plant requires full com­mit­ment to hun­dreds of MW capac­i­ty dur­ing one invest­ment peri­od, the report explains. “As demand for elec­tric­i­ty changes,” the US researchers said, “the deploy­ment of dis­trib­uted renew­ables pro­vides investors with increased flex­i­bil­i­ty to extend capac­i­ty in small­er sizes as to not leave the investor with large-scale strand­ed assets.”

With 2 mil­lion inhab­i­tants, Koso­vo is still a dis­put­ed land between Repub­lic of Ser­bia, which claims it as it’s own ter­ri­to­ry after, and the Repub­lic of Koso­vo. Cur­rent­ly, 111 out of 193 mem­ber states of the Unit­ed Nations have rec­og­nized Koso­vo as an inde­pen­dent state.

Browse News

Main Menu
RAEL Info

Energy & Resources Group
310 Barrows Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3050
Phone: (510) 642-1640
Fax: (510) 642-1085
Email: ergdeskb@berkeley.edu


Projects

  • Open the Main Menu
  • People at RAEL

  • Open the Main Menu