Bileća hydropower plant project of 32 MW under development in BiH

State-owned firm Hidroelektrane na Trebišnjici intends to install hydropower plant Bileća of 32 MW, consisting of two turbines. It would be the last facility in its Gornji horizonti subsystem, downstream from planned HPP Nevesinje and the Dabar unit, which is under construction.

Hidroelektrane na Trebišnjici – HET, a subsidiary of state-owned power producer Elektroprivreda Republike Srpske (ERS), applied for a preliminary environmental impact assessment for the Bileća hydropower plant project.

It proposed a version with two turbines of 32 MW in total and a flow of 60 cubic meters of water per second. Hypothetical maximum power of 33.5 MW would enable an annual output of 122 GWh, calculations showed.

The request was filed with the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Construction and Ecology of the Republic of Srpska, one of two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina. The other one is called the Federation of BiH.

The three hydroelectric units in the Gornji horizonti cascade are planned for an overall capacity of 252 MW

The run-of-river Bileća hydropower plant is envisaged to be the third and last in a row within the Gornji horizonti subsystem on the Trebišnjica river. The planned Nevesinje unit, of 60 MW, is supposed to be the first one in cascade.

Hydroelectric plant Dabar is in the middle. The 160 MW facility is under construction. The location for Bileća, named after a nearby town in the southeast of BiH, is at the lower end of a water tunnel dug up in 2006 between Fatnica and the Bileća lake or Bilećko lake. BiH shares the water body with neighboring Montenegro.

Below that point, Hidroelektrane na Trebišnjici operates hydropower plant Trebinje 1 and small hydropower plant Trebinje 2. Croatia’s HEP Group shares the output from hydroelectric facility Dubrovnik with ERS. It is located where the Trebišnjica river meets the Adriatic Sea. Similarly, Elektroprivreda HZHB, which took over pumped storage unit Čapljina in 1992, delivers half of its electricity to ERS.

Total annual output of the entire hydroelectric complex on the Trebišnjica river can reach 3.9 TWh

Including the projects in the pipeline, the hydroelectric complex on the Trebišnjica river can reach a capacity of almost 1.1 GW and produce as much as 3.9 TWh per year.

The designs for almost all the units were produced in the 1980s, while the one for Bileća was finished in 2015. The hydropower plant, which will be in the vicinity of the Čepelica village, will have a negligible environmental impact, except for air pollution during the construction phase, according to a document that HET filed together with the request.

Of note, the Republic of Srpska awarded EFT Group with a concession last year for the construction of Bileća solar power plant of 60 MW. There is also a project in the same entity for a 73 MW solar power plant called Trebinje 1.