The energy supply company Eon Hrvatska is planning investments of EUR 50m and will be considering PPAs for hundreds of megawatts of solar capacity that it has in the pipeline, one of its managers says.

Croatia’s PPA market is just starting to get underway, with only a few contracts signed to date.

In March, the renewables company Encro signed a virtual 10-year PPA with the Swiss utility Axpo for its 111 MW wind farm in the Zadar region, while the Croatian telecommunications company Hrvatski Telekom announced last year that it had signed a 10-year PPA with the wind energy company Liburana.

Eon Hrvatska also recently signed a contract to build and operate a cogeneration biomass plant for the Bauwerk Group’s parquet factory, which includes a seven-year PPA.

“The PPA segment is heading in a positive direction across Europe. Although the regulatory framework is not fully defined, we are optimistic,” Vedran Belamaric, the company’s director of energy infrastructure solutions, told Montel this week.

He explained that not all companies have room for an on-site power plant (which can on average cover around 25% to 30% of a company’s energy needs), so Eon plans to offer corporate power purchase agreements for the solar power plants it plans to build for established customers.

In 2022, Eon Hrvatska installed 50 MW of solar capacity that included 84 projects for large business clients. Half were rooftop installations and half were land based.

One such power plant is a 9.7 MW land-based solar farm that was built for the pharmaceutical company Pliva under a build-operate-transfer contract. It was installed on land owned by Pliva at its factory in the central Croatian town of Savski Marof.

Business strategies

In the long term, Eon Hrvatska is planning to offer auxiliary services, such as virtual power plants and storage facilities, but for now solar installations are its focus.

Belamaric said that in Q1 of this year the company signed more rooftop solar contracts than in 2022 as a whole, while its planned land-based solar installations will amount to hundreds of megawatts.

Although Eon is no longer an energy supplier in Slovenia, this remains a strategic element of the company’s business in Croatia, which has recently been restructured, he added.