Djerdap 3: Jaroslav Cerni Institute Prepares Study, Plan

The Ministry of Mining and Energy said on October 16 that it has agreed a timetable with representatives of a consortium of companies for preparing part of the technical documentation for the Djerdap 3 pumped storage hydropower plant. The consortium is led by the Jaroslav Cerni Water Institute, and the type of documentation now being prepared has not been produced for this project before.

What must the consortium produce?

The assignment has two parts, according to the ministry’s statement:

• a pre-feasibility study with a general design
• a spatial plan for a special-purpose area, with a strategic environmental impact assessment

The ministry says the schedule of work was also agreed at the meeting. It adds that the process will demand efficient coordination, because a large number of domestic institutions will be involved in the project.

What did Milan Aleksic say?

Milan Aleksic, adviser for capital investments at the Ministry of Mining and Energy, spoke at the meeting, and his words were carried by the Beta and Tanjug agencies:

“This is the first time this type of documentation is being prepared for the Djerdap 3 pumped storage project, and the goal is to lay a good foundation for the next steps together with experts from domestic institutes. This is one of the most important and largest projects in Serbian energy, given the complexity of the project in design, engineering and construction terms, the cross-border impacts, and the need to align key parameters with neighboring countries as well,” Aleksic said.

Aleksic added that once built, Djerdap 3 will be one of the largest energy facilities in Southeast Europe and has the potential to become Europe’s largest “natural battery,” that is, an energy storage site. The mention of cross-border impacts means the key parameters of the project are not set in Belgrade alone but are agreed with neighboring countries.

What about the rest of the documentation?

The study and the spatial plan are only part of the job. In parallel, the ministry says, a procedure is under way to produce the rest of the design and technical documentation, under the intergovernmental agreement between Serbia and the United States on energy cooperation.

Six companies applied to the public call for that part, and the ministry states that the Bechtel and Enka consortium met the qualification requirements to move to the next phase. That phase is the start of negotiations.

The statement gives no figure for the plant’s capacity in megawatts, the value of the investment or construction deadlines, so the scale of the spending can only be discussed once those figures are published.