Romania is trying to fix its grid congestion by making paper reservations expensive to hold, and July 14 is when that bill comes due.
For years, the country’s biggest renewable energy bottleneck was not sunshine, wind, or capital. It was queue discipline. Grid capacity was reserved faster than it was ever built, and the reservations that clogged the system rarely turned into megawatts. Order 15/2026, published by the national energy regulator ANRE in the Official Gazette on May 25, 2026, is the tool designed to clear that backlog. For developers without committed equity, it is a deadline. For institutional capital, it is an entry point.
What Order 15/2026 actually changes
The reform rewrites the economics of holding grid capacity in Romania.
Under Order 15/2026, developers with connection contracts signed before May 25, 2026 for projects over 1 MW have until May 25, 2027 to secure a Setup Authorization (Autorizatie de Infiintare). Anyone who registered for capacity allocation before the order took effect has until July 14, 2026 to post a €20,000/MW bank guarantee. The guarantee must be irrevocable, unconditional, and enforceable on ANRE’s first request. It is not a formality. It is a cash test.
The headline numbers are worth reading closely, because they signal intent:
- The guarantee tied to the grid connection tariff rises from 5% to 20% of the tariff value (excluding VAT).
- Capacity allocation auctions require a deposit of €20,000/MW for the 2026 round, with the first auction expected in October 2026.
- Securing a Setup Authorization now carries a separate guarantee of roughly €30/kW, or €30,000/MW, valid until the plant is commissioned.
- For new projects above 1 MW, the Setup Authorization must be obtained within 12 months of signing the connection contract, and no later than 18 months from the date of the grid connection permit (ATR). Miss the window and the ATR is invalidated, the connection agreement terminates automatically, and the guarantee is forfeited.
In exchange for the tougher entry cost, ANRE gives serious developers more room to build: the minimum validity of an ATR doubles from 12 to 24 months, and the window to request a validity extension grows from 30 to 60 days. The message is consistent throughout the order. Real projects get more time. Speculative ones get a price they cannot ignore.
Here is the number that explains why ANRE moved
Under the old 5% guarantee, only 12% of projects went on to sign a connection contract. About 3% got as far as a building permit. Roughly 1% reached a Setup Authorization.
The old filter did not separate real developers from paper reservations. This one is priced to.
The scale of the distortion is easier to see at the system level. Reserved grid capacity in Romania had swelled to roughly 80,000 MW against a realistic near-term need of around 9,000 MW, and by the government’s own account, less than 10% of allocated grid capacity had progressed to actual investment. ANRE President George Niculescu was blunt that the 5% guarantee was never enough to separate projects that block capacity from projects that build it. Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan framed the logic in plain terms: companies that complete their projects get their guarantees back, while those who never intended to invest lose their deposits and free up access for everyone else.
Grid congestion in Romania has always been partly synthetic, a function of reserved capacity nobody intended to build. Order 15/2026 is an attempt to make that synthetic congestion disappear.
Why the squeeze creates an opening for capital
For institutional funds, the gap between reserved capacity and real capacity is the opportunity.
Developers without committed equity are now facing a cash call they cannot clear, and their capacity rights lapse if they do not find a partner in time. Expect two waves of forced sales: one before July 14, 2026, and another before May 2027. Buyers with capital get late-stage assets at a discount, often with the hardest permitting milestones already behind them. The reform effectively converts a licensing problem into a transaction pipeline, and the counterparties on the selling side are motivated by a clock, not by valuation.
This is where the reform stops being a compliance story and becomes an investment story. The projects worth owning were always the ones with genuine progress toward construction. Order 15/2026 makes those projects easier to identify, because it strips out the reservations that were never going to move.
Why Romania is still the right place to deploy
It would be a mistake to read tighter rules as a cooling market. The opposite is happening underneath the regulation.
Romania added roughly 1.5 GW of solar in the first five months of 2026 alone and is on track to break its deployment record for a second consecutive year. Battery storage has crossed the 1 GWh mark and is climbing toward 500 MW of installed power, with national needs projected at 10 to 20 GWh by 2030. The Ministry of Energy estimates around €127 billion of energy investment is required across the decade, and the money is already arriving: roughly €3 billion from the EU Modernisation Fund is backing a Contracts-for-Difference round covering about 3,472 MW, alongside a dedicated €150 million scheme for standalone battery storage.
The geography reinforces the case. Dobrogea holds some of the strongest onshore wind resources in southeastern Europe, and southern regions such as Muntenia combine competitive solar irradiation with proximity to demand. Land and development costs remain well below mature Western European markets like Germany, the Netherlands, and France, while Romania keeps the regulatory protections of the EU single market. Add a Contracts-for-Difference framework that offers long-term revenue certainty and a coal phase-out targeted for 2032, and the structural demand for new clean capacity is not in question.
The capital flow already reflects this. KKR, Greenvolt, and Renovatio are building more than 250 MW of wind in Ialomita for over €400 million. Sanko Enerji’s Romanian venture is developing a 403 MW wind project in Tulcea worth around €800 million. HELLENiQ Renewables, the EBRD, and a range of pan-European and Nordic developers are deploying capital across wind, solar, and storage. The demand for well-structured Romanian assets is real. What has been missing is a clean way to separate those assets from the noise.
What to watch next
The open question is whether the freed-up capacity actually clears where it is needed. Transelectrica publishes connection capacity maps that are updated monthly, and they are the place to watch whether capacity genuinely reopens in Dobrogea and Muntenia, or simply gets re-absorbed by the next queue of speculative filings. If the maps show real headroom returning in the strongest wind and solar zones, Order 15/2026 will have done its job. If the queue refills with the same kind of reservations it was designed to flush out, the reform will need a second iteration.
For now, the direction of travel is clear. Romania is repricing access to its grid so that capacity flows to the developers and investors who actually build. That is a healthier market, not a smaller one.
Momentum Energy’s View
At Momentum Energy, we read Order 15/2026 as a filter, not a barrier. A €20,000/MW guarantee is a meaningful hurdle for a shell company holding capacity on hope. It is a rounding error for a disciplined investor with a real construction plan. That asymmetry is exactly the point, and it works in favor of committed capital.
Our focus over the next twelve months is on the two liquidity windows the reform creates: the run-up to July 14, 2026, and the longer runway to May 2027. Both will surface late-stage projects whose original sponsors cannot meet the cash call, and the best of those assets carry permitting progress that would take years to replicate from scratch. We would rather acquire proven progress at a sensible price than reserve raw capacity and hope the grid cooperates.
We also want to be objective about the risk. Industry bodies, including Romania’s wind and photovoltaic associations, have warned that higher guarantees could raise costs and slow some development, and that concern deserves a fair hearing. The reform will only succeed if the freed capacity is genuinely reallocated rather than recycled into a new speculative queue. We will be watching Transelectrica’s monthly capacity maps as closely as anyone.
Our conclusion is straightforward. Romania combines Dobrogea-grade wind, competitive solar, EU-backed revenue support, and costs below Western Europe, and it is now cleaning up the one structural flaw that held the market back. For investors who can move with capital and conviction, that combination makes Romania one of the most compelling renewable energy markets in Europe right now.
