The open pits at Oslomej, near Kičevo in western North Macedonia, used to feed a coal-fired power plant. They now host a 65.8 MWp solar farm, and a 50 MW / 200 MWh battery is being built beside it. Law firm Schoenherr has confirmed that it advised the Green for Growth Fund (GGF) on financing the battery through project company OSM SOLAR DOOEL Skopje.
The sponsor is Renalfa IPP. The Austria-based producer is a joint venture between Renalfa Solarpro Group and French investment group RGreen Invest, and it won one of two 50 MW solar plants in a state tender held in April 2021. The solar plant was built in a public-private partnership with state utility Elektrani na Severna Makedonija (ESM) and has been running since 2023.
GGF knows the site well. The fund arranged €25.7 million in project finance for the solar plant on the former Oslomej coal mine, its second project finance deal in North Macedonia after taking a minority stake in the 36 MW Bogoslovec wind farm in 2021. At an investment forum in Tirana in October 2025, GGF and Renalfa signed a mandate letter for €24 million for the battery. Renalfa said on 4 May 2026 that installation had begun.
Why it matters
Schoenherr calls the project one of the first grid-scale battery investments in North Macedonia and the Western Balkans. Four hours of storage next to an existing solar plant should improve grid flexibility and let the operator make better use of the plant’s output. Oslomej may not have the only battery on site for long, though: Fortis Energy, which runs another solar plant there, is adding a 62 MW battery system from Pomega.
The coal-to-solar story at Oslomej started with the state utility. ESM built the first solar plant on an abandoned coal pit in the Western Balkans there and commissioned it in 2022. More is coming: in August 2026, PowerChina was picked to build 30 MW across two sites, 10 MW on an exhausted Oslomej pit and 20 MW near the Bitola coal plant, in a contract worth €12 million.
The legal work
English-law finance documents sat alongside a Macedonian-law security package, and Schoenherr staffed the deal from Vienna and Skopje. Partner Attila K Csongrady, counsel Peter Redo and associate Naomi Sarah Ryan handled English law. Partners Andrea Lazarevska and Jovan Barović, with attorney Filip Srbinoski, covered Macedonian law: energy regulation, the local aspects of the financing documents, and setting up and perfecting the security.
Lazarevska named the country’s evolving regulatory framework and the drawdown conditions as the hard parts, and said the deal “sets an important precedent” for large-scale storage in North Macedonia. Csongrady presented it as evidence that debt funds can get English-law depth and in-country expertise from a single team.
Renalfa’s wider plans give a sense of scale. An EBRD-led €315 million holdco financing supports a €1.2 billion programme for about 1.6 GW of generation and 3.3 GWh of co-located storage across Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and North Macedonia. Oslomej’s 200 MWh is a small part of that. On land that once supplied coal to a power station, though, it says a lot about where the region is heading.
