BESS owner-operator NGEN has put its Šibenik project into commercial operation in Croatia, claiming it as the first standalone project to connect at the transmission-level.
The 60MW/120MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project at the IMPOL-TLM industrial complex in Šibenik was officially opened last week on 4 November, NGEN said in an accompanying post on LinkedIn.
NGEN delivered the project in partnership with developer NextGrid Energy with a total investment of €60 million (US$67 million). It is connected to Croatia’s electricity system at the 110kV transmission grid level.
Tesla provided its Megapack XL and 2 XL grid-scale products for the project (see our recent ESN Premium write-up of the 2 XL and its successor the Megapack 3).
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NGEN emphasised that the project is fully merchant with no contracted revenues, and its primary operation will be providing aFRR, also known as secondary reserve, to the country’s transmission system operator HOPS (Hrvatski operator prijenosnog sustava). NGEN is controlling the project via its software and controls system.
It appears to be the same project that is a part of NGEN’s virtual power plant (VPP) platform in Croatia, combining BESS and a broader VPP network. That platform has been invested in by pension fund Raiffeisen, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and also benefits from funding under the EU’s Modernisation Fund, as detailed by us in a report a year ago.
NGEN is headquartered in Slovenia and is the largest BESS player there but launched its expansion outside of home turf in 2022/23, when we caught up with founder and CEO Roman Bernard about its activities. Bernard said at the time it was also looking beyond the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region, and it has since started building projects in Germany and Austria.
The news comes a month after our publisher Solar Media, part of Informa Connect, held the fourth annual Energy Storage Summit CEE 2026 in Warsaw, Poland.
