Romania Awarded 4.2 GW Under Its CfD Scheme. The Real 2026 Question Is Who Has the EPC Capacity and Equipment to Actually Build It
Across two auction rounds, in 2024 and again in August 2025, Romania’s Ministry of Energy awarded roughly 4.2 GW of solar and wind capacity a 15-year Contract for Difference, beating the country’s original 3.5 GW target under its Recovery and Resilience Plan. That headline number has been widely reported as a policy success, and on paper it is one. The number that actually determines whether Romania hits its 2030 renewables targets is a different one: how much of that 4.2 GW has a contractor who can build it, equipment that can be delivered on schedule, and a grid connection waiting at the other end.
For investors underwriting Romanian renewables exposure, the CfD award is the easy part of the story. What happens between contract signature and commercial operation is where the real risk sits, and 2026 is the year that risk becomes visible.
The scoreboard: what 4.2 GW actually looks like
Across both rounds, developers submitted 128 technically valid bids for a combined 7.1 GW against a roughly 5 GW ceiling, and 70 projects won contracts. Round 1, closed in 2024, awarded about 1.53 GW, split between 10 wind projects totaling 1.1 GW and 11 solar projects totaling 432 MW. Round 2, closed in August 2025, awarded 2,751 MW, split between 1,488 MW of solar across 26 projects and 1,263 MW of wind across 23 projects, the latter meaning every technically valid wind bid in that round won a contract. A third, smaller auction in December 2025 topped up wind capacity by a further 315.8 MW after round 2 came in short of its wind target. Put together, Romania’s awarded CfD portfolio now stands at roughly 1.92 GW of solar and 2.36 GW of wind.
Named winners give some sense of who is actually positioned to deliver. Rezolv Energy, already building its 240 MW VIFOR wind farm from round 1, backed by EUR 331 million in project finance, added 731.2 MW in round 2 across the Dama Solar project in Arad county, which the company says could become Europe’s largest solar plant, and the 300 MW Dunărea East wind farm in Constanța. Econergy’s 125 MW Heliolux solar project, awarded at EUR 49.4 per MWh in round 1, is targeting construction from 2025 through completion in 2027. Other round 1 winners include Nofar Energy’s 70.2 MW Slobozia solar project, Greenvolt’s 125 MW Țăndărei wind project, European Energy’s 117.8 MW Berești wind project, and Electrica’s 54 MW Crucea Est wind project. For round 2, no official complete winners list had been published as of this writing, which is itself a data point: visibility into exactly who holds the other roughly 2.7 GW of contracts is still incomplete.
The prices behind the megawatts
The weighted average strike price across both rounds came in at EUR 57.9 per MWh, EUR 69.3 for wind and EUR 43.8 for solar, but the trend inside that average is the more important signal. Solar strike prices fell from an average of EUR 51 per MWh in round 1 to bids as low as EUR 35.77 per MWh in round 2, a nearly one-third drop in a single auction cycle. Wind moved the other way, rising roughly EUR 9 per MWh between rounds to a weighted average of EUR 69.3, with round 2’s wind auction clearing only about 60 percent of its 2 GW target because bidders were not willing to go below roughly EUR 65 per MWh.
That divergence matters for delivery risk. Analysts at the Energy Policy Group have flagged that Romania’s 15-year strike prices adjust for inflation only once every three years, and only if inflation has exceeded 10 percent cumulatively, meaning developers who bid aggressively low on solar are locking in years of real revenue erosion if costs run even moderately higher than planned. The concern raised is direct: at some solar strike prices, forfeiting the bid bond may become more economically rational for a developer than actually building the project.
Why 2028 is the year that matters
Roughly 83 percent of the awarded 4.2 GW targets 2028 as its commercial operation deadline, and the December 2025 top-up auction set the same 2028 completion requirement for its wind projects. That concentration means Romania does not have a steady multi-year build-out to plan around, it has a single, compressed construction window in which somewhere close to 3.5 GW of solar and wind needs permitting, procurement, construction, testing and grid energization to be finished essentially at once.
The EPC and equipment bottleneck
Industry participants are already flagging the constraints that window will run into. Transelectrica has confirmed that grid connections from 2026 will be allocated on an area-dependent capacity basis, a shift Costel Constantin of Transelectrica described plainly: connection availability will now depend on where in the country a project sits, not just when it applies. Transelectrica has committed RON 9.5 billion, about EUR 2 billion, to grid modernization aimed partly at the storage and congestion issues already limiting how much new capacity local networks can absorb.
On the construction side, Kamen Nedyalkov of SolarPRO has pointed to a less glamorous but very real bottleneck: the administrative load of commissioning and registering new PV plants. Developers without sufficient in-house documentation capacity, he noted, will see delays purely from paperwork, independent of physical construction progress. On the financing side, Raiffeisen Bank’s Cătălin Cepișcă has been explicit about the contractor gap itself, calling for a larger pool of EPC contractors with genuine international experience, and urging banks and developers to bring that expertise in at the design phase rather than after financial close, specifically to reduce execution risk on projects already locked into fixed COD dates.
Two distinct ways 4.2 GW of awards fails to become 4.2 GW of operating capacity
Investors stress-testing this portfolio are really underwriting two separate risks that happen to land in the same year. The first is financial: solar projects that bid down to the mid-thirties euros per MWh may simply not clear a bankable return once real construction costs, financing costs and a decade of uncompensated inflation are priced in, making bond forfeiture a live possibility rather than a tail case. The second is physical: even projects that remain economically viable are competing for the same finite pool of EPC contractors with international delivery experience, the same equipment supply chains, and the same area-limited grid connection slots, all converging on a 2028 deadline. A project can clear the first risk and still fail to clear the second, and vice versa.
Does this make Romania a credible place to bet on delivery
The honest assessment is that Romania’s CfD framework is genuinely well designed on the demand side: a 15-year price guarantee, EU Modernisation Fund backing worth roughly EUR 3 billion, and EBRD support that has already helped mobilize close to EUR 1.6 billion in financing since 2024 give developers real revenue certainty that many regional peers cannot offer. Victoria Zinchuk of the EBRD has pointed to the auction’s oversubscription as evidence of a credible, competitive mechanism, and the fact that round 2 solar was oversubscribed at all, even at falling prices, says something about how attractive Romanian revenue certainty still looks to international capital. What the framework does not yet solve is supply-side capacity, EPC contractors, equipment logistics, and grid connection slots, all of which are finite and all of which the market is now discovering were not scaled to match a nearly threefold jump in auctioned capacity between round 1 and the full CfD program. Romania looks like a strong place to contract for renewable revenue. Whether it is currently a strong place to guarantee construction delivery by 2028 depends on which EPC contractor, and which grid connection slot, a given project actually has lined up.
Momentum Energy’s View
We think the 4.2 GW headline number is the least useful figure in this story for anyone doing real underwriting. The more useful exercise is asking, project by project, whether a developer has a named, experienced EPC contractor under contract, whether its equipment orders are placed and sequenced against the area-based grid allocation Transelectrica is now running, and whether its solar strike price still clears a bankable return once a realistic cost escalation path is applied rather than the three-year, ten-percent inflation trigger written into the CfD terms. The projects that answer all three questions cleanly, largely the ones backed by developers with a completed project already in the ground, look like some of the more credible merchant and quasi-merchant bets in the region. The rest of the 4.2 GW is still, honestly, a number on a spreadsheet until 2028 proves otherwise.
If you are underwriting Romanian CfD exposure, how is your diligence weighting EPC contractor track record against strike price alone? We would be interested to hear how others are separating the projects likely to reach COD from the ones more likely to forfeit their bond.
