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Albania government wants to build Skavica HPP

Date: February 4^th 2010 Author: Gjergj Erebara, Tirana Category: Articles
Topic: Electricity

Tirana, 3 Feb 2010. Albania’s Prime Minister Sali Berisha has declared that his country's government is thinking to build the Skavica hydropower plant using its own money, after a tender to construct it through a concessionary agreement failed to attract interest from foreign investors.

“There exists an enormous natural asset that needs to be put to use,” Berisha said in his weekly briefing.

Skavica hydropower plant is an old project, first conceived in 1980s during communist rule, that aims to use the remaining space of Drini River. It has been considered a very strategic project for Albania because the plant could produce up to 1.2 billion kilowatt/hours (a 25 per cent increase from the current level of production) per year, while also increasing the amount of electricity produced at the three other HPPs that were built in the past on the Drini.

PHOTO: Alenka Žumbar

“There exist the ideal conditions to build the plant. I have ordered the Ministry of Energy to start procedures for the preliminary project design and other necessary studies,” Berisha said. The existing project foresees the building of a dam to create important storage capacity and a production plant with an installed capacity of 250 MW.

Preliminary evaluations indicate that such a project could cost up to 600 million euro, while the major problem remains the remoteness of the area. Situated in a mountain valley in north-east Albania, Skavica is 50 kilometres from any paved road.

Back on 2004, the government of Albania signed a concessionary agreement to build Skavica with a group of Italian companies. TGK Skavica Srl changed the original design of the hydropower plant and proposed a new design that both removed the storage facility to save costs and increased the installed capacity to 500 MW. The agreement failed to produce results.

In 2008, the government opened an international bid. Six major foreign companies expressed preliminary interest in the project, but none of them filed an offer. The bid was considered officially failed in January 2010.

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