Croatia Aims for Power Plant Deal by Year End

Croatia's state power board Hrvatska Elektroprivreda (HEP) said on Wednesday it had received qualified bids for the construction of a 500-megawatt thermal power plant on the northern Adriatic, but declined to offer details until the bids were assessed.

"We are satisfied with this second round of a tender which showed there was confidence among investors into the future of this project... After at least one month it will be possible to reveal which bidders are chosen for further talks," HEP said in a statement.

It said that the strategic partner for a new block in the Plomin plant would be chosen at the end of August at the earliest.

"Our goal is to sign a contract by the end of this year," the statement said.

Last year HEP shortlisted four bidders to partner it in the construction of the new block in a coal-fired plant in Plomin.

The bidders were Italy's Edison, KOSEP from South Korea, Marubeni (MARUF) from Japan and Poland's POL-MOT. However, local media reported that POL-MOT and KOSEP had decided to withdraw from the race.

The value of the new block of the Plomin plant was assessed at between 800 million and 1 billion euros.

The project met resistance from local environmentalists who advocate gas instead of coal as a fuel, but they failed to block its implementation.

Croatia hopes to boost its independence of electricity imports by this project. The European Union's newest member imports on average some 30 percent of the annual electricity consumption.

(Reporting by Igor Ilic, editing by William Hardy)