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Romania: RES investments boom halted, investors pulling back

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Romania was quick to adopt supporting mechanisms for all renewable energy sources consisting mainly of a system of mandatory quotas combined with green certificate trading. But there is some bad news on the market.
For several years investors in Romania benefits from significant potential in various renewable energy sources. Recent market trends show bad trends, green certificate market is collapsing due to a major reduction in the annual mandatory quota of electricity produced from renewable energy sources.
While investors have focused mainly on wind in the past, things are different now that there has been a move towards solar projects. For example, the Romanian solar park developed last year with 350 additional MW, reaching 1,223 MW in total in 2014 while the generated solar energy counted for about 1.5 percent of the total power delivered to the local market. The projects that have been developed so far in Romania consist mainly of generating units for retail and trading purposes.
Romania was quick to adopt supporting mechanisms for all renewable energy sources consisting mainly of a system of mandatory quotas combined with green certificate trading. But there is some bad news on the market. At present, the green certificate market is collapsing due to a major reduction in the annual mandatory quota of electricity produced from renewable energy versus the values set out in Law 220:11.1 percent compared to 15 percent in 2014 and 11.9 percent compared to 16 percent in 2015. According to energy and gas market regulator ANRE, in late 2014 the total number of green certificates issued through the program was 12.7 million fewer than the quota estimated by the institution at the beginning of the year, i.e. 17.6 million. For 2015, ANRE estimates the issuance of 18.1 million green certificates, up 3 percent from the previous year.
There are also bad signals from market, investors are pulling back also. Monsson Group, the largest developer in the Romanian wind energy sector, decided recently to dismantle its windmills from CEE Targusor from Constanta. The decision is the result of the legal regulations adopted by the Romanian Government in the past two years and the uncertainty regarding the Romanian renewable energy market. “Unfortunately the major changes of the legal framework for renewable energy doesn’t allow our project to be in line with the initial economical parameters, becoming unfeasible from a financial perspective,” stated in a press release Sebastian Enache, business development manager at Monsson Group, earlier this year. The company has invested over EUR 200 million in building and operating wind and solar parks.

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