INA finished 11 MW of solar inside its Rijeka refinery, and the power is for a hydrogen machine
INA says panel installation at the Rijeka refinery reached mechanical completion at the end of June. The 11 MW plant will feed an electrolyser for green hydrogen. EUR 15 million in Recovery plan money, about EUR 61 million in total, Koncar as main contractor. Testing comes before switch-on.
Picture a refinery that wants to make a clean gas on site. The machine that makes it runs on electricity. So the refinery builds its own solar plant inside the fence, right next to it.
On 2 July 2026, INA said the installation of solar panels at its Rijeka refinery was finished. Civil and assembly works ended on the last day of June. INA calls that mechanical completion. Installed capacity is 11 MW. The power will run an electrolyser, a machine that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity, for what INA calls the first commercial green hydrogen plant in Croatia.
INA says this met the first deadlines in its EUR 15 million co-financing contract from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Koncar is the main contractor. Total project value is about EUR 61 million. Final testing and technical checks come before the solar plant starts running. Installation of the electrolyser is expected to finish by the end of 2026.
Balkan Green Energy News, reporting the next day, put the electrolyser at 10 MW and first hydrogen output in 2027.
Analogy: this is a bakery building its own flour mill next to the ovens. The mill is not there to light the shop. It feeds one machine.
Good: a named industrial site, a named size, a named grant and a named contractor, all from the company itself. Croatian heavy industry is putting solar on its own land to feed its own process.
Bad: no battery is mentioned. INA gives no expected yearly output and no share of the electrolyser's power the panels will cover. EUR 61 million is the whole hydrogen project, not the solar plant alone.
Ugly: mechanical completion is not switch-on. Testing is still ahead, and the electrolyser is a separate build due by end-2026. Anyone reading this as a cheap-power story for a factory roof is reading the wrong page.
Source: INA, 2 Jul 2026 - first phase of the green hydrogen plant at Rijeka refinery completed; Balkan Green Energy News, 3 Jul 2026 - INA builds solar park for green hydrogen electrolyzer. No output, tariff or payback on either page, so none here.