Romania’s Ministry of Energy has initiated a call for proposals for 950MW of green energy projects. These projects will receive financial support from a €457.7 million grant that is jointly provided by the Romanian government and the European commission. This story was first reported by other renewable energy news websites in late March.
Virgil Popescu, Romanian Minister of Energy, said that the purpose of this aid scheme is to improve the country’s energy security over the long run. Furthermore, the scheme will support wind power and PV projects that are with or without an integrated energy storage component.
The distribution of the grant is as follows: EUR 372.7 million will be allocated to projects that are greater than 1MW in scale, and EUR 75 million will be allocated to projects that are 200kW-1MW in scale. The grant will be given in the form of rebates. For PV projects, the per-MW rebates for >1MW and 200kW-1MW projects are set at EUR 425,000 and EUR 750,000 respectively. For wind power projects, the per-MW rebates for >1MW and 200kW-1MW projects are set at EUR 1.3 million and EUR 650,000 respectively. Hence, more financial support is given to smaller projects. The total amount of rebate for a single project is capped at EUR 15 million.
The Energy Ministry will be receiving proposals between March 31 and May 31. Bidders are required to be solvent with all taxes paid. They are also obligated to have their projects come online by the end of June 2024.
To address the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU has implemented a program known as the Recovery and Resilience Facility. Under the program, individual member states will develop a National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) that will be co-financed by the European Commission. Bulgaria’s NRRP was approved by the European Commission last September. The funding of Bulgaria’s NRRP is divided into EUR 14.2 billion in grants and EUR 14.9 billion in favorable loans. Furthermore, it allocates EUR 1.2 billion to energy projects.