By Momentum Energy | Energy Transition & Investment Insights
Romania is sitting on one of the most compelling renewable energy stories in Central and Eastern Europe. The land, the wind, the solar irradiation the fundamentals are there. And the numbers in the grid connection queue seem to confirm the excitement: tens of gigawatts of projects waiting to connect. So why does actual construction remain a fraction of that pipeline?
The answer lies in a gap that is becoming familiar across Europe the gap between ambition and execution, between a grid connection permit and a shovel in the ground.
The Queue Is Real. But So Is the Illusion.
As of April 2025, Romania’s National Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE) reported that 1,228 projects with a capacity of 1 MW or more hold valid grid connection permits (ATRs), totalling over 60 GW across the entire system transmission and distribution combined. At the transmission level, managed by Transelectrica, the pipeline of wind and solar projects with grid endorsements has exceeded 20 GW, with an even larger volume in the queue still awaiting approval.
The figure of 31 GW circulating in industry conversations refers to the active pipeline at the transmission grid level projects that have either secured or are in the process of securing an ATR from Transelectrica. It is a number that signals extraordinary investor interest in Romania’s energy future.
But look deeper, and the picture shifts:
- Only 11% of projects with valid ATRs are fully authorised meaning they have cleared all the permits needed to actually build.
- As of April 2025, only 136 projects had reached full authorisation, representing roughly 5,591 MW less than 10% of the total queued capacity.
- Just 401 projects have received construction permits, representing around 14,867 MW.
- A mere 35 projects incorporate storage, despite energy storage being a declared national priority.
The queue, in short, is significantly inflated by projects that are not yet and may never be viable for construction.
Why Projects Stall: The Five Core Bottlenecks
1. Speculative Project Accumulation
For years, Romania’s grid connection system operated on a “first come, first served” basis. Filing for a grid connection permit required minimal financial commitment. The result? Thousands of applications from developers who wanted to secure capacity without any serious intention to build in the near term. Experts and regulators alike have described the market as “flooded” with projects of varying quality. Legal firm Vlăsceanu & Partners estimated that around 70 ATRs issued after August 2024 alone are being closely monitored, and their cancellation could release approximately 3.5 GW of currently blocked capacity.
2. Grid Infrastructure Lag
Romania’s transmission infrastructure was simply not built for the volume or geography of renewable energy now entering the system. Transelectrica’s network currently spans approximately 9,100 kilometres of high-voltage lines and 81 electrical transformer stations infrastructure designed for a centralised, fossil-fuel-based generation model. In some of the 10 pre-defined grid zones used by Transelectrica to calculate available capacity, available connection capacity is already zero, meaning new projects face the prospect of deep reinforcement works before they can connect. These works are expensive, time-consuming, and until recently, poorly allocated across developers.
3. Permitting Complexity
Getting from an ATR to a construction permit is not a linear process. Environmental approvals, urban planning certificates, land rights, and coordination with distribution system operators all run on separate timelines. Developers have reported that the average journey from authorisation to grid connection runs between 1.5 and 2 years in Romania and that is for projects that progress without interruption. Projects facing appeals, land disputes, or regulatory changes can stall far longer.
4. Regulatory Uncertainty (Until Recently)
Romania’s energy regulatory environment has historically been characterised by frequent changes. Investors particularly international ones require regulatory predictability as a precondition for financing. The frequent amendments to grid connection rules, support scheme structures (green certificates, CfDs), and permitting procedures created what industry observers called “volatility,” even if individual changes were well-intentioned.
5. Grid Congestion and Negative Pricing Risks
As renewable capacity rises faster than grid reinforcement, Romania has experienced increasing grid congestion. The growing number of prosumers (over 170,000, accounting for 2.2 GW of distributed solar) adds further complexity. Without sufficient storage and smart grid capabilities, large-scale renewable projects risk curtailment a risk that affects project economics and therefore the willingness of project finance teams to sign off.
The Reforms Changing the Equation
Romania is not standing still. A wave of regulatory reforms many of which came into force during 2024 and 2025 are fundamentally restructuring how grid access is managed.
ANRE Order No. 53/2024 (August 2024): Introduced a 5% financial guarantee as a prerequisite for receiving a grid connection permit for projects above 1 MW. This single change immediately raised the barrier to entry for speculative projects.
ANRE Order No. 20/2025 (June 2025): Brought in sweeping changes including:
- Solution studies to be completed in chronological order, with only fully documented projects placed in the analysis queue.
- A two-month window to establish financial guarantees post-study, with failure resulting in automatic closure of the connection request.
- Introduction of “operational limitation” provisions allowing temporary restriction of power evacuation under specific grid conditions to maintain system safety.
- Extensions to connection agreements only permitted with additional 5% guarantees per 12-month extension, eliminating the practice of indefinite extensions on the basis of weak justifications.
Auction-based Grid Allocation from January 2026: The single most structurally significant change. From January 2026, all new generation and storage facilities of 5 MW or more must secure grid access through annual competitive auctions, replacing the first-come-first-served model entirely. Transelectrica will publish available capacity by region on January 15 each year, and auctions will be held by July 1. This ensures that grid space goes to developers with serious, financeable projects not speculators.
The Investment Case: Why Romania Remains Compelling
Despite the bottlenecks, the fundamentals that drove 31+ GW of pipeline interest have not changed. If anything, the reforms make the case stronger for serious investors.
Solar and Wind Resources: Romania ranks among the most resource-rich countries in South-East Europe. The Dobrogea region already home to some of Europe’s largest wind farms offers exceptional capacity factors. Southern Romania’s solar irradiation levels are among the highest on the continent north of the Mediterranean.
Contracted Support: The first CfD auction awarded contracts to 11 solar projects at a weighted average price of €51/MWh for solar and €65/MWh for wind both well below the strike price ceiling, indicating strong competition and project viability. A second CfD auction offering 3.47 GW of capacity launched in May 2025, reinforcing the government’s commitment to long-term market visibility for developers.
Record Build Momentum: Romania added 1.7 GW of solar in 2024, its second consecutive year of GW-scale solar growth, reaching nearly 5 GW of cumulative solar capacity. The 2025 deployment target of 2 GW is described as “attainable,” with more than 1.6 GW already under construction as of early 2025.
Grid Investment Acceleration: Transelectrica has proposed an investment programme of over €130 million for 2025 the most ambitious in recent years with plans to build over 740 km of new overhead power lines by 2030, backed by €649 million in European funding attracted over the past three years alone. The 2024–2033 Development Plan foresees total investments of 9.49 billion lei (approximately €1.9 billion).
Storage Legalisation: The Energy Storage Law (OUG No. 134/2024) eliminated unnecessary taxes on stored energy and simplified investment in battery storage. BESS capacity grew from just 10 MW/20 MWh at the start of 2024 to 137 MW/269 MWh by year-end with a target of 2 GW of storage by 2030.
EU Alignment and Offshore Potential: Romania’s Offshore Wind Energy Law sets a target of 3–7 GW of offshore wind by 2032, leveraging a World Bank-estimated Black Sea offshore potential of 76 GW. The country is also advancing toward Guarantees of Origin (GO) issuance, which will open Romanian renewable certificates to European PPA buyers significantly expanding the investment and off-take base.
Momentum Energy’s View
At Momentum Energy, we have been closely tracking Romania’s energy transition not as observers, but as practitioners. And our view is clear: Romania is not just a market of potential it is increasingly a market of substance.
The 31 GW pipeline figure is sometimes cited as evidence of disorder. We read it differently. It reflects the scale of investor conviction in Romania’s fundamentals in its solar and wind resources, its geographic position as a future energy hub for South-East Europe, its EU membership, and its growing corpus of bankable infrastructure.
The challenge was never the ambition. It was the architecture of a system that allowed ambition without accountability. The reforms of 2024 and 2025 financial guarantees, chronological processing of documentation, mandatory auction-based allocation are exactly the mechanisms that mature energy markets use to filter signal from noise.
We also take note of the grid investment acceleration. Transelectrica building 60% of Romania’s new lines constructed over the last 20 years in just two years is not a detail it is a structural shift. Combined with the auction mechanism launching in January 2026 and the second CfD round already underway, Romania is assembling the institutional infrastructure of a serious, scalable energy market.
The fraction of projects getting built today will grow. Regulation is catching up with ambition. And for investors, developers, and off-takers who understand the Romanian market and can navigate its complexity, the window of differentiated opportunity is open but it will not stay open indefinitely.
Romania is not a market to watch from the sidelines. It is a market to be positioned in.
