Belgrade Energy Forum 2026, held in Belgrade and organized by Balkan Green Energy News, welcomed energy ministers, policymakers, energy professionals and high-level speakers to address Southeast Europe’s energy transition amid evolving geopolitical and market realities. Fortis Energy participated in this year’s edition both as a sponsor and as a delegation, with a team spanning its senior leadership and project teams: President Mehmet Burak Üçkardeş, CEO for Central and Eastern Europe Nikola Oklobdžija, CEO for Türkiye Hakkı Barış Karaca, Head of Project Development Nevena Virijević, Head of Project Finance Ivan Radović and Associate Project Finance Ivana M. Milojević attended the forum, reaffirming Fortis’s commitment to the region’s green transition.
Nikola Oklobdžija took the stage as a speaker on the panel titled "From Intermittency to Reliability: BESS Integration in SEE", contributing Fortis Energy’s on-the-ground development experience to one of the forum’s key discussions.
The panel addressed a challenge that remains central to the region’s energy agenda: translating growing investor interest in battery energy storage systems into bankable, large-scale projects. As the conversation around BESS in Southeast Europe matures, the focus is shifting beyond technology and installed capacity, toward the harder questions of grid integration, revenue mechanisms, project financing and real-world performance under increasingly volatile market conditions. Oklobdžija brought a developer’s perspective to these discussions, grounded in Fortis Energy’s active project pipeline across Central and Eastern Europe and its firsthand experience navigating the commercial and regulatory complexities that determine whether storage projects move from pipeline to financial close.
Fortis Energy’s green baseload strategy — integrating solar, wind and energy storage systems to deliver reliable, dispatchable clean energy — continues to gain traction across the region. In North Macedonia, Oslomej SPP (80 MWp) is being paired with a contracted battery storage system comprising 104 MWh of capacity. In Serbia, Sremska Mitrovica SPP (270 MWp), now nearing ready-to-build status, is being developed in full alignment with the country’s updated regulatory framework mandating storage integration in new solar projects, and will be paired with a 72 MWh battery storage system.
Forums like BEF serve as vital platforms for aligning policy, regulation and private investment, and Fortis Energy’s continued presence underscores its role as an active contributor to that process across Southeast Europe.