For most of the last decade, Romania’s solar story was written in a footnote to bigger conversations about Poland, Greece, or Bulgaria. That footnote is now out of date. According to the Romanian Photovoltaic Industry Association (RPIA), the country closed 2025 with more than 7 GW of cumulative installed solar capacity, after adding 2.2 GW in a single year. RPIA’s policy director, Irene Mihai, has said the country is now aiming to exceed its 10 GW by 2030 target well ahead of schedule, with roughly 2.5 GW of further additions expected in 2026 alone.
That is the headline. The number that matters more for anyone building a decade-scale investment thesis sits further out: Romania’s own strategic energy planning documents point to a minimum of 26 GW of solar capacity by the 2040s, more than double the original 2030 ambition. For long-horizon funds and strategic investors, the 10 GW milestone is a confirmation of execution capability. The 26 GW figure is the actual planning number.
Why the 2030 target stopped being the interesting question
Romania’s National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), most recently updated and reviewed against European Commission guidance, set a national target of roughly 38.3% renewables in gross final energy consumption by 2030, alongside a solar buildout originally framed around 10 GW of total capacity (split roughly between utility-scale and prosumer segments in the latest update). Earlier drafts of the plan had floated more conservative combined solar-and-wind figures, but successive revisions kept pushing the solar component upward as deployment consistently outran projections.
The pace of that deployment has been the real story. Solar additions grew 308% year over year in 2023 compared with 2022, then kept climbing: 1.7 GW added in 2024, 2.2 GW in 2025, with 2026 tracking toward another record year (roughly 1.5 GW installed in just the first five months). Three consecutive years of accelerating growth is not a one-off subsidy cycle. It is a market that has moved from early-stage to mid-cycle, which is precisely the phase long-horizon capital tends to prefer, since the regulatory and technical risks of the early build-out have already been worked through.
The 26 GW number, explained
Romania’s newly adopted National Energy Strategy (2025 to 2035, with an outlook to 2050, formally adopted after roughly 17 years without an updated version) commits the country to 24 GW of combined wind and solar capacity by 2035, a roughly five-fold increase from 2021 levels. Separately, sector planning documents cited in recent industry coverage put the solar-specific figure at a minimum of 26 GW by the 2040s. The broader strategy targets 40 GW of total installed electricity capacity by 2035, with renewables making up 82.1% of that mix, and envisions renewable energy covering 86% of national consumption by 2050, with electricity generation exceeding 100% of gross final demand.
For an investor modeling asset life cycles of 20 to 25 years, the 2040s figure is the more useful anchor than the 2030 milestone. A project financed and connected today will likely still be generating well into the period these long-range targets describe, which means the relevant question is not “will Romania hit 10 GW” (it already looks set to) but “does the market have room, grid capacity, and policy support to keep growing toward 26 GW and beyond.”
The infrastructure case: grid, storage, and offtake
Three structural pieces support that longer growth path.
Grid and transmission.
Romania’s National Energy Strategy prioritizes grid modernization alongside generation buildout, with coal phase-out targeted by 2031 and new nuclear capacity from 2029, both of which will require and justify continued transmission investment that also benefits solar interconnection.
Storage.
Transelectrica, the transmission system operator, estimates that integrating all currently planned renewable capacity will require 10 to 20 GWh of storage by 2030. Installed battery capacity has already crossed the 1 GWh threshold and is approaching 500 MW of power, up from 138 MW/269 MWh previously, and the 2 GW storage target in the NECP is expected to be exceeded by the end of 2026. A dedicated €150 million government scheme is supporting standalone battery storage specifically.
Offtake and financing.
Romania’s Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction scheme has become a central financing mechanism. Its second round, backed by €3 billion from the EU Modernisation Fund and supported by the EBRD, awarded 2,751 MW and pushed cumulative CfD-backed capacity to 4.2 GW, surpassing the original target. Corporate power purchase agreements are also maturing quickly: 2024 was described by market advisors as a record year with roughly three times as many signed PPA transactions as before, at prices generally in the €65 to €85/MWh range. International capital is already active on the ground. The European Investment Bank recently committed €34 million as part of a €121 million financing package (alongside the EBRD and Romanian lender BCR) for 190 MW of new solar capacity in Oltenia, developed by Scatec ASA, with commercial operation expected by September 2027.
What still needs watching
None of this makes Romania a risk-free market, and an honest long-horizon thesis has to account for the gaps.
The PPA market, while growing quickly, is still described by practitioners as emerging: price-cap mechanisms on the regulated segment discourage some buyers from signing long-term contracts, and Romania’s absence from the Association of Issuing Bodies complicates the guarantees-of-origin market that many corporate offtakers now require. Grid connection queues and permitting timelines remain a recurring complaint among developers, even as the transmission strategy is being upgraded. And Romania’s 30.7% renewables target for gross final energy consumption was flagged by the European Commission as falling short of the 34% the EU’s own formula would suggest, a reminder that ambition and binding delivery are not always the same thing in Brussels’ eyes.
Set against neighboring markets, Romania’s 308% year-over-year growth in 2023 outpaced both Bulgaria and Czechia, and it enters this decade with a maturing CfD framework, EU Modernisation Fund backing, and multilateral lenders (EIB, EBRD) already underwriting individual projects, three ingredients that regional peers do not all have simultaneously.
Momentum Energy’s View
We read the data the same way the market’s most recent capital flows suggest others are reading it: the 10 GW target was never really in doubt, and it is close to irrelevant as an investment signal at this point. What should anchor a serious allocation decision is the 26 GW-by-the-2040s trajectory, because it implies a market that keeps building for another fifteen-plus years, backed by a national strategy that ties generation growth to grid modernization, storage buildout, and a maturing offtake market rather than to subsidy programs alone.
We would not describe Romania as risk-free, and we think investors should price in the PPA market’s current growing pains and the grid bottlenecks developers still report. But for funds and strategics building a decade-scale thesis rather than chasing a single auction cycle, Romania currently offers a combination that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere in the region: proven execution against an aggressive near-term target, a credible and much larger long-term planning number behind it, and early multilateral capital already validating the underwriting case. That combination is why we continue to treat Romania as one of the more compelling long-horizon solar markets in Europe, not despite the scale of the 26 GW ambition, but because of it.
