Serbia has started works on a 205 million euro ($238 million) power transmission project that aims to strengthen the country’s power grid and its regional connections, the energy ministry said.

Construction has started on two high-voltage transmission lines worth 22 million euro that will link the capital Belgrade with the second largest city of Novi Sad, the ministry said in a statement earlier this week, according to Seenews.

The BeoGrid 2025 project is divided into six parts, with works expected to start soon also on a power substation in Belgrade that will be connected via a new 83-km transmission line with the Cibuk 1 substation at the 158 MW Cibuk 1 wind farm in the northern municipality of Vojvodina. It will help improve the transmission of electricity from renewable energy sources, while easing the load on the existing power network.

BeoGrid 2025 is part of the North Continental South East Corridor (North CSE Corridor) that aims to boost the transmission capacities between Serbia and Romania via a planned upgrade of the existing 400kV overhead line (OHL) linking Serbia’s Djerdap 1 hydropower plant with Romania’s Portile de Fier to a double-circuit OHL.

The North CSE Corridor is part of the electricity transmission route that links Serbia to Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Italy. The corridor will be integrated into the Trans-Balkan Electricity Corridor, increasing electricity transit from Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Moldova to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

An overall 500 million euro will be invested by the end of the decade in projects to link Serbia’s power grid with the grids of eight neighbouring countries, with the total value of all planned projects reaching around a billion euro, deputy minister in charge of electricity, Rados Popadic, said in the statement.