Sofia heating utility opens 149.4 mln euro tender for CHP plant
The municipally-owned heating utility of Bulgaria's capital Sofia said on Monday that it has launched a tender for a 292.2 million levs ($181.8 million/149.4 million euro) contract for the construction of a combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Sofia.
The heating utility, Toplofikatsiya Sofia, intends to utillise EU financing under operational programme Environment 2014-2020, as well as a loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to finance the construction of the CHP plant, it said in a tender notice.
The contract also envisages a two-year warranty period, as well as the provision of technical support and staff training within a three-year period.
The construction of the CHP plant will utilise refuse derived fuel (RDF) as part of Sofia's waste management strategy. The RDF is produced at the Sadinata site, which was equipped with a Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) plant through an earlier EU-financed project.
The deadline for submitting offers is March 15.
Last month, the European Commission said that it has referred Bulgaria to the Court of Justice of the EU over its failure to comply with a previous court ruling which found that Bulgaria is in breach of the EU's ambient air quality legislation.
"In particular, Bulgaria systematically and continuously failed to comply with the limit values for particulate matter (PM10) and to adopt appropriate measures to keep the period of exceedance as short as possible," the European Commission said in a statement at the time.