Published by Momentum Energy | May 2026
There is a gathering this week in London that most Romanian solar developers and energy buyers will not attend. That is precisely why it matters.
The Renewables Procurement and Revenue Summit (RPR Europe), organised by Solar Media and now in its fourth year, brings together more than 400 clean energy leaders at the Hilton London Tower Bridge on 20 and 21 May 2026. Developers, independent power producers, utilities, corporate offtakers, and financiers are meeting to negotiate power purchase agreements, stress-test revenue strategies, and set benchmarks for the year ahead across 13 European markets. Romania is explicitly on the agenda.
What happens in that conference hall will not stay there.
The Summit as a Price-Setting Mechanism
Summits like RPR Europe are often described as networking events. That framing undersells their function. When procurement leads from hyperscalers, heavy industry, and public sector energy buyers sit in the same room as solar developers and PPA advisors, the conversations that emerge effectively set the floor and ceiling for offtake pricing across the continent.
This year’s agenda is particularly pointed. Sessions are dedicated to how the reordering of grid connection queues is reshaping curtailment projections, how negative and volatile capture prices have affected PPA availability and pricing, and what hedging strategies independent power producers are deploying to secure long-term price security. One session specifically asks: in the current pricing environment, is this even the right year to lock in a long-term PPA?
That last question is not rhetorical. It has a direct bearing on every Romanian solar asset currently in development or seeking offtake.
The Structural Shift That Changed Everything
To understand why this summit matters so much for Romania in 2026, it helps to understand what has happened to European solar PPA economics over the past 18 months.
Europe has entered what market analyst Pexapark calls “The Big Repricing.” This is not a cyclical dip. It is a structural reassessment of value, risk, and revenue across electricity markets triggered by the rapid dominance of renewables. In 2025, renewable sources generated 47.8 percent of all electricity in the European Union. Solar power alone produced more than 340 terawatt-hours, accounting for 12.6 percent of the total electricity mix. Solar and wind together have now overtaken fossil fuels and nuclear as the largest source of electricity in Europe.
That growth is extraordinary. It has also broken the old revenue logic.
In 2025, Europe recorded more than 9,000 hours when power prices fell below zero. Germany saw negative prices 6.6 percent of the time. Spain saw them 6.3 percent of the time. In Germany, the average price earned by solar power dropped to approximately 53 percent of the normal baseload electricity price in 2025, compared with nearly 90 percent just a few years ago. Spain and France saw solar plants earn only 51 percent and 58 percent of baseload prices respectively.
The continental P25 solar PPA price tracked by LevelTen Energy declined by more than 5 percent in Q2 2025, fell a further 2.4 percent in Q3, and continued downward in Q4. By Q1 2026, the average solar PPA price across Europe had fallen 13 percent year-on-year.
The cause is well understood: an oversupply of solar generation during peak hours is cannibalising capture rates. Simple pay-as-produced agreements are becoming harder to close in solar-saturated markets. The corporate PPA market across Europe contracted by roughly 30 percent in total volume during 2025, and the number of signed deals dropped from 317 in 2024 to 247 in 2025. According to SolarPower Europe, Germany alone saw a 56 percent decline in solar PV capacity contracted through PPAs between 2024 and 2025.
This is the context in which the London summit takes place. And this is exactly why Romania’s position in that conversation is more important than it has ever been.
Why Romania Is Being Repriced Upward Relative to the Rest
Here is the part that often gets lost in the broader European narrative of falling prices and cautious buyers: not every market is moving in the same direction, or at the same pace.
LevelTen Energy’s Q2 2025 Price Index noted that Italy, Poland, and Romania posted particularly robust PPA price declines due in part to an oversupply of energy. That sounds negative on the surface. But there is a crucial distinction between prices declining because a market is mature and oversupplied, and prices declining because they were previously elevated and are now normalising toward their true competitive level.
Romania belongs in the second category.
In Central and Eastern Europe, renewable power generation remains relatively limited compared to Western Europe. This supply constraint contributes to elevated baseload electricity prices and higher capture rates for renewable energy projects. PPAs signed in the CEE region have historically priced higher than those in more mature Western European markets precisely because buyers in those markets are paying a premium for scarcity.
As Romania scales, that scarcity premium is compressing. But the underlying fundamentals are strengthening at the same time.
Romania added 2.2 gigawatts of solar in 2025, a third consecutive year of growth, taking total installed capacity past 7 gigawatts. The Romanian Photovoltaic Industry Association projects 2.5 gigawatts of additional capacity by the end of 2026. Romania’s second CfD auction, completed in August 2025 with EBRD support, awarded 2,751 megawatts of capacity, bringing the combined total from the first two auctions to 4.2 gigawatts, surpassing Romania’s national target of 3.5 gigawatts under the Recovery and Resilience Plan. Bids in that second auction saw solar prices as low as 35 euros per megawatt-hour, an outcome described by the EBRD as underscoring Romania’s increasing competitiveness.
The market is scaling. Revenue certainty is improving. And the corporate PPA pipeline is alive.
According to analysis from Trio Advisory, Romania maintained a healthy level of PPA activity in 2025, with roughly 500 megawatts of capacity contracted. This came at a time when overall European corporate PPA volumes were falling sharply. While markets like Germany and Spain were seeing 56 percent and 7 percent declines in contracted solar volumes, Romania was holding its ground. The Q4 2025 LevelTen index specifically highlighted that CEE markets like Poland and Romania had shown relative resilience when broader European contracting was moderating.
That resilience matters to the buyers walking the floors of the London summit this week. When a procurement lead from a global technology company or an industrial manufacturer is evaluating where to contract their next 10-year solar PPA, they are not just looking at the current price. They are looking at the trajectory of capture rates, the risk of cannibalisation, the depth of the grid, the regulatory stability of the market, and the quality of the guarantees of origin attached to the power.
On all of those dimensions, Romania is moving in the right direction. And the London summit is where that calculation gets made.
The Guarantees of Origin Question
One structural issue that RPR Europe will directly confront is the tradeability of guarantees of origin from Central and Eastern European markets. This is not a technical footnote. It is a central pricing variable.
Romania became an observer of the Association of Issuing Bodies (AIB) in 2025, with an assumed deadline to become a full member by January 2027. AIB membership means that Romania’s guarantees of origin will become compatible with the European Energy Certificate System and tradeable across borders. That opens the door to a substantially wider pool of corporate offtakers.
Currently, as PV Magazine reported, the pool of offtakers for Romanian solar remains limited due to the non-tradeability of those certificates. That constraint suppresses competition among buyers and therefore suppresses the price developers can achieve. Once AIB membership is confirmed, that constraint lifts. The LevelTen Q3 2025 report noted directly that as more markets in Eastern Europe move toward AIB membership, corporate offtake opportunities are poised to expand even further.
Buyers at the London summit who are negotiating framework agreements now, ahead of the AIB transition, are effectively pricing in a discount for that remaining uncertainty. Developers who understand this dynamic can structure contracts accordingly.
The Negative Pricing Risk That Must Be Addressed
Romania is not without its challenges, and serious market participants understand this. The country faces a specific negative pricing risk that is sharper than many Western European markets, even if the frequency of negative price hours is lower.
Research from Synertics, analysing 11 European countries between November 2024 and October 2025, placed Romania in a category of markets where limited grid infrastructure creates extreme market volatility. When negative pricing events occur in Romania, they can reach minus 7 to minus 10 euros per megawatt-hour, even though the share of energy exposed to such periods remains lower than in solar-saturated Western markets. Solar assets are more affected than wind due to the simultaneous midday generation profile.
This matters for PPA pricing conversations at the London summit. Corporate buyers and their advisors are now significantly more sophisticated about cannibalisation risk and negative-price exposure than they were even two years ago. Developers who walk into those matchmaking sessions without a clear answer to the question of how their Romanian assets handle settlement during negative price periods will find it harder to close.
The broader structural answer is hybridisation with battery energy storage. Romania’s October 2025 milestone of its first publicly announced BESS optimisation deal, a 202 megawatt per 404 megawatt-hour standalone system owned by Swedish operator Repono, is a signal that the storage market is beginning to materialise. The second CfD auction explicitly included provisions for the integration of storage into energy markets. Projects that can pair solar generation with even modest battery capacity fundamentally change their capture rate profile and their attractiveness to sophisticated offtakers.
At RPR Europe this week, hybrid PPAs pairing wind or solar with BESS are expected to be among the most discussed contracting innovations. Romanian developers who can credibly present a hybridised revenue story are entering those conversations with a meaningful advantage over those still structuring pure-play solar offtake.
What This Means for Offtake Pricing in Practice
Pull all of this together and the picture for Romanian solar offtake pricing in the second half of 2026 looks as follows.
At the Western European end of the PPA market, cannibalisation is a structural reality. Germany is pricing solar PPAs in the high 40s to low 50s of euros per megawatt-hour and trending lower. Spain, despite its exceptional irradiation advantage, saw the most competitive percentiles fall below 30 euros per megawatt-hour in Q4 2025, reflecting the degree of market saturation. Corporate buyers from these markets are increasingly looking eastward for diversification, better capture rates, and additionality.
Romania’s solar irradiation in its southeast regions reaches 1,650 kilowatt-hours per square metre, competitive with parts of southern Europe and significantly above most Central European markets. The CfD framework provides a price floor that reduces merchant risk for utility-scale assets. The PNRR and Recovery and Resilience Facility funding is accelerating rooftop and commercial installations. The Mordor Intelligence market forecast projects Romania’s solar capacity growing from 6.79 gigawatts in 2025 to 15.31 gigawatts by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate of 14.52 percent.
The benchmarking that happens at the London summit, in the rooms and the margins of those structured one-on-one sessions, will directly shape how buyers discount or premium-price Romanian solar offtake relative to other European options. Developers and asset owners who show up to those conversations with clean data on capture rates, grid connection status, regulatory timeline, and storage integration plans are in a fundamentally better position than those who do not.
The repricing is already underway. The summit this week is where it gets formalised.
Momentum Energy’s View
At Momentum Energy, we have been closely watching the evolution of the European PPA market and what it means specifically for Central and Eastern European solar, with particular focus on Romania.
Our view is that Romania is entering a pivotal window. The country has the solar resource, the policy infrastructure, the institutional support from the EBRD and EIB, and the growing CfD mechanism to support a major scaling phase. The second CfD auction exceeding its own national targets, with bids as low as 35 euros per megawatt-hour, demonstrated that Romanian solar can compete on price with Western European assets while offering characteristics that those assets cannot match: lower cannibalisation risk, higher baseload capture rates, and genuine pipeline depth.
The London summit will bring many of the buyers and advisors who can convert that potential into signed offtake agreements. We believe that as AIB membership for Romania moves from observer status toward full membership ahead of the January 2027 deadline, the corporate PPA opportunity will open materially. The tradeability of guarantees of origin is not a bureaucratic milestone; it is a market access event that will bring new classes of international offtakers into the Romanian market.
We also acknowledge that the negative pricing challenge is real and must be addressed structurally, not managed away with contract clauses. The path forward runs through storage integration, smarter grid dispatch, and more sophisticated PPA structures that reflect the actual value profile of Romanian solar assets rather than replicating Western European templates that were designed for different market conditions.
Romania is not simply the next Spain. Its market dynamic is different, its risk profile is different, and its opportunity window is different. But the fundamentals are strong, the direction of travel is clear, and the conversations happening in London this week will determine how quickly that value gets recognised in offtake contracts across the market.
We are paying close attention.
