North Macedonia is structuring its planned 100 MW / 400 MWh battery in Bitola as strategic grid infrastructure, not solely as a merchant trading asset. The project is estimated to cost 98 million euros. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is considering a sovereign-guaranteed loan of up to 33.1 million euros.
The four-hour system is also expected to receive financing from KfW, concessional funding from the Clean Technology Fund and an investment grant from the Western Balkans Investment Framework (WBIF). The EBRD loan remains under consideration, alongside these additional expected sources of finance.
The project also covers central SCADA, generation-planning and trading software, and IT and cybersecurity infrastructure for ESM. These systems form part of the wider operating-system integration, alongside the planned battery storage capacity.
Grid services underpin the financing approach
System integration and dispatch quality affect the value of storage. The financing structure accounts for benefits that may be difficult to monetise through a pure merchant model, including less renewable curtailment, greater system flexibility and improved balancing capability.
Public and concessional capital can help fund these benefits even if day-ahead arbitrage alone cannot support the same debt burden. The project offers a potential financing model for other Western Balkan utilities, in which a first large battery energy storage system is funded as a grid-modernisation platform. Merchant revenues would improve the economics rather than underpin the entire credit case.
