Analysis: Hydro Power Plants’ Construction in Western Balkans Will Become Increasingly Difficult

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The projects for constructing hydroelectric power plants in Western Balkan countries will become increasingly difficult to realize in the future due to climate change, public opposition and financial challenges, wherein such projects would not contribute to energy security or do not possess sufficient economic potential, it was stated in an analysis made by several international organizations.

Hydro-power plants traditionally play a large role in the power generation systems of many countries in southeastern Europe, with a particularly large share in some countries of the Western Balkans where, together with coal, they have been the pillar of electricity generation for decades now.

The analysis, titled “Why is hydro-energy in southeastern Europe a risky investment?” reads that many countries in southeastern Europe were in the phase in which new hydro-power capacities would either not contribute to energy security due to excessive dependence, which is the case in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro, or have little economic potential in the case of Bulgaria and Kosovo.

Albania is almost 100-percent dependent on hydro-energy, Montenegro around 50-percent, while Bosnia and Herzegovina generates around a third of its electricity in hydroelectric plants, Serbia around 28 percent and North Macedonia almost a quarter. “It is then not surprising that, when the need to develop renewable energy became a part of the EU’s political agenda at the end of the 1990s and the start of the 2000s, the governments of southeast European countries mainly saw that as the possibility to build more hydroelectric power plants,” reads the report published by the organizations CEE Bankwatch, EuroNatur, RiverWatch and WWF Adria.