In the first ten months of 2015 234.391 MW hours of electricity, was produced from renewable sources in Macedonia, which is three times more compared to the production last year, MEPSO published. The strong growth in production of green energy is mainly due to the start up of the wind farm Bogdanci and doubling the capacity of small hydro power plants, while first kilowatts also came from a biogas power plant.
The wind farm Bogdanci got connected to the electricity system on April 2, 2014, and up to November 2015 it delivered 175 million KW hours. There are 16 wind generators in this location with installed capacity of 37 MW, which can generate 100 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is enough to supply a city with 60 000 inhabitants.
The total integrated power of the privileged electricity producers in Macedonia is 109 MW. Out of that 53 MW goes to small hydro power plants, 16 MW goes to solar power plants, 3 MW to bio gas and 37 MW to wind farms.
Companies producing electricity from renewable sources produced 29 MWH per hour on average in 2015. Last year’s production of green energy is three times bigger compared to 2014 when the average production per hour was just 9MWh. Considering that in the state level 800 MWh is produced per hour, it means that the privileged producers cover 4 percent of total production.
Producers of green energy made 24.1 million euro last year. The average price paid by the Macedonian households and companies was 103 euro per MWh which is 2.5 times more expensive than the price of the electricity produced in the conventional power plants. This means that the regulated price that was approved by the Regulatory Energy Commission is 44 euro per MWh while the price of electricity in the free market ranges from 30 to 70 euro per MWh.
According to the action plan for renewable sources it is planned for their participation in the total consumption to be 21 percent by 2020 and 28 percent by 2030. Even though the hydro power plants will give the largest contribution to the increase of the participation of renewable power in the next 15 years, it is foreseen that the biggest growth in production will be in solar power plants and wind farms.
According to the Strategy in 2020 the wind farms will be producing 9 kten (kiloton – the equivalent of oil) of energy, in 2025 – 26 kten and in 2030 – 53 kten, which will be an increase of six times. In the same period the solar energy will grow from 3 to 11 kten or almost four times. The production from bio mass, bio gas and hydro power plants will be double, transmits Serbia-energy.eu
