Photo by: Harvey McDaniel

Construction started at the weekend on the first wind park in Macedonia, located near the south-eastern town of Bogdanci, which is being built with financial support provided by the German development bank KfW.

Sixteen windmills will be built with a capacity between two and three megawatts at the wind farm, which will cover 29 hectares.

“The goal is to increase the use of renewable energy sources while producing electricity, thus reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and decreasing Macedonia’s import dependency on electricity,” said the head of ELEM, Dejan Boskovski.

ELEM operates some 1,400 MW of power-generating capacity, of which 60 per cent is coal-fired and 40 per cent hydro power. The utility produces over 6,000 GWh of electricity each year and the rest, up to one third of the country’s annual needs, comes from imports.

The new wind farm would add over 100 GWh of electricity generation per year which should give the country around two per cent more power.

The total value of the deal for the wind farm amounts to 55 million euros, of which 33 million will be provided by Germany’s state-owned KfW Bank and the remainder by ELEM.

When it’s finished, the project envisages additional instalments of wind turbines in an effort to further increase the power of the wind farm.