The construction of a large-scale wind farm in Serbia, a joint project of Slovenia's Alfi Green Energy Fund and Serbia's MK Group, has received a major boost as the investors have been granted a bank consortium loan. The 105 MW project is valued at €155 million.

The total value of the loan has not been disclosed, but the business newspaper Finance reported earlier that the two investors will get €100 million under the loan agreement and will chip in the rest themselves.

What they plan to build is the Krivača wind farm in eastern Serbia, a project that the Slovenian energy company Petrol had been developing until the end of 2021.

Petrol backed out then and Alfi Renewables, owned by several former Petrol executives, took over. They set up Alfi Green Energy Fund, which is dedicated to renewable energy projects and has raised €104 million from investors.

The planned wind farm is now the joint project of Alfi Green Energy Fund and the Serbian holding company MK Group, which also owns Gorenjska Banka in Slovenia.

The loan agreement has been signed with banks from the groups Erste, NLB and Raiffeisen as well as the Austrian development bank Österreichische Entwicklungsbank, the two investors said on 3 February.

It is a result of the first long-term agreement on buying energy from a renewable energy project in Serbia, which is an important milestone in south-eastern Europe's energy transition, Alfi Renewables said.

The Krivača project will consist of 22 wind turbines with a capacity of 4.8 megawatts each. The first turbines are expected to be installed in the spring and the complex is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year.