Austrian-Bulgarian JV To Complete Biomass-fueled Heating Plant in Bulgaria by October

An Austrian-Bulgarian joint venture company plans to complete the construction of a biomass-fueled heating plant in Bulgaria by October, one of the partners said on Friday.

The network is being established and an order for the boiler has been placed with Austria's Warmebetriebe, Bogdan Ugarchinski, the general manager of one of the patners in the joint venture, Bulgarian Energy Company (BEC), told SeeNews.

Originally, the joint venture of Warmebetriebe, BEC, Austria's Soravia Group and Bulgarian energy company Gazenergocomplect, called Bulgaria-Carinthia Energy, planned to open the plant in 2007 but administrative procedures had taken much longer than expected, Ugarchinski told SeeNews.

"We should be ready around October,” he said.

The plant will have an installed capacity of three megawatts (MW) of heating energy and one MW of electricity. It will be built in the town of Ihtiman, 40 kilometres east of Sofiia.

Bulgaria should cover 11% of its electricity consumption from renewable sources by 2010 and 16% by 2020 under an agreement with the European Union which it joined in 2007.

The plant was originally estimated to cost 2.0 million euro ($3.2 million), but the delay has increased costs to 3.2 million euro. Bulgaria-Carinthia Energy will finance 80% of the project with a loan from Italian Unicredit-owned Bulbank.

The Ihtiman plant will need some 10,000 cubic metres of waste wood from municipal logging per year. It will reduce the cost of heating for social institutions in Ihtiman and for individual consumers. The town has about 20,000 residents.

"We consider opportunities to build other plants in the country as well. We have held negotiations with the mayor of [the southern town of] Velingrad," Ugarchinski said.

Upon completion of the Ihtiman plant, Bulgaria-Carinthia Energy will seek a commercial operator of the facility.

($ = 0.6302 euro)

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