Belgrade Power Plants: Expo Heating Plant Begins Test Run

The new heating plant behind the Serbian Pavilion at the Expo site in Surcin is set to enter test run soon. Vanja Vukic, director of Belgrade Power Plants, announced the news on September 10 at the “Dani komunalaca 2026” (Utility Days 2026) conference in the Playground hall at the Belgrade Fair, adding that system testing has already begun.

The facility combines four functions in a single location: heating for buildings and apartments, running hot water, cooling, and electricity production. It runs on natural gas, and according to the director, the company’s own engineers took part in the design.

The company’s first ever cooling service

Cooling is a service Belgrade Power Plants has never offered since the company was founded. Vukic pointed to this as the key novelty of the Expo site facility, where the specialized international exhibition “Expo 2027” will run from May to August 2027.

“This is the first time since Belgrade Power Plants was founded that we are introducing a new service. The technology we will use is among the best in the world, and our own people took part in the design,” Vukic told reporters.

According to him, natural gas is used as the energy source, which means lower harmful gas emissions than older solutions in the district heating system.

A geothermal well 2,000 meters deep

At the same event, Vukic also announced that Belgrade Power Plants, together with the Faculty of Mining and Geology, will soon begin exploring geothermal sources in Belgrade. According to a study already conducted, geothermal water in certain parts of the city sits at a depth of around 2,000 meters, at a temperature of about 110 degrees Celsius. Faculty experts rate the study as 95 percent accurate.

The next step is an exploratory well to confirm the find, and only after confirmation is a production well planned. The director also raised the possibility of building thermal energy storage units to store heat.

“Once we confirm it, we will move to a production well and try to exploit it just like some European cities do. We are also considering thermal energy storage units so we can store thermal energy and use it when needed,” Vukic said.

If the exploratory well proves successful, the geothermal source would give Belgrade Power Plants a third energy source for heating the city, alongside gas and its existing thermal capacity, following a model the director cited as practice in certain European cities.

Context: modernizing the utility sector

The announcement came at a conference organized by the Association for Utility Services of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia, where representatives of public utility companies, local governments and industry experts discussed introducing new technologies to the sector. The event also included panels on heating cities without air pollution and on smart technologies in utility services.

Dalibor Joknic, secretary of the Association for Utility Services at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia, said the Chamber is trying to steer the entire utility sector toward new technologies through three processes: digitization, digitalization and system integration.

“We have a great story with Belgrade Power Plants, we also have one with Parking Service, they have been introducing innovative solutions for a long time, and we will try to bring those solutions into the water supply and waste management sectors,” Joknic said, noting that such innovations are fairly costly and that maintaining the systems alone is already a major expense for utility companies.

The heating plant at the Expo site is thus becoming one of the first concrete examples of that announced modernization: a facility that heats, cools and generates electricity from the same plant, running on gas with geothermal energy as a possible next step.

Belgrade Power Plants has not yet specified a date for the full test run to begin.