The €100m ($136.6m) project will be built on government-owned land in the town of Kikinda, near Serbia’s borders with Hungary and Romania, according to the local newspaper Blic.
Alongside Kosovo, Vojvodina is one of two semi-autonomous regions in Serbia, boasting its own assembly and executive council in the provincial capital of Novi Sad and control over its infrastructure.
Considered one of China’s “big five” state-owned energy utilities, Huadian was the world’s tenth-largest wind developer last year, and is rapidly warming to large-scale PV.
Huadian was widely believed to be planning a Hong Kong initial public offering in the second half of 2011 for its renewables division, Fuxin New Energy. But jitters in global financial markets have silenced such reports in recent months.
Like many Eastern European countries, Serbia’s power sector – dominated by state-owned Electricity Power Industry of Serbia (EPS), and heavily reliant on coal – is in dire need of investment and upgrade.
Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic has indicated EPS may be broken up or partially privatised over the next few years, although his comments have been met with fierce resistance. German utility RWE has been tipped as a likely “strategic partner” of EPS in the event of a privatisation.
Earlier this year EPS and Serbian insurance group Dunav began work on the country’s first PV project, a 5MW facility in the western Zlatibor region.
Source:rechargenews.com
