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Investors eyes Serbia capital Belgrade district heating investments

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Venture capital group PostScriptum Ventures plans to abandon its wind energy push in Serbia and focus instead on developing a district heating project there, the company’s chairman said.

PostScriptum Ventures had to exit its wind power business in Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria as the respective governments cut their feed-in tariffs to an extent that made those ventures unprofitable, Mark Crandall told SeeNews in an interview on the sidelines of the Deals and Dealmakers conference organized by Capital weekly in Sofia earlier this week.

Belgrade Heating project targets up to 18mW capacity in first phase
“The next project we are working on is to build district heating in Serbia, using heat pumps to extract heat from the Sava river in Belgrade,” the official said.

The project is pretty far along, the public-private partnership tender will be launched over the next six weeks and PostScriptum Ventures plans to participate in the process.

“We think we know more about the subject than anybody else and we fully expect to win the tender. If we do, then we will start building it sometime next summer, making it operational for the next heating season,” Crandall said.

The first stage of the project will encompass about 15-18 MW of heating energy capacity with investment costs seen at 10 million euro ($10.9 million), Crandall said, adding that the second phase will reach an investment of about 100 million euro.

The authorities in Belgrade want to see how the district heating project will turn out in the first phase, before launching the second phase.

“We will probably make an investment commitment on the second phase by the middle of 2017.”
source: Seenews

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