The headline number from Romania’s renewable auctions was solar. It is easy to see why. In the second Contracts for Difference round in August 2025, solar cleared at a startling EUR 40.35 per MWh, one of the lowest strike prices anywhere in Europe. Cue the celebration: solar is now the cheapest electron in the room.<\/p>\n
But while the market fixated on that number, a quieter event told a more useful story. Romania had to run a third CfD auction, dedicated only to onshore wind, because the wind quota in the previous round had not filled. When the results came in around the start of December 2025, wind cleared between EUR 59.95 and EUR 74.9 per MWh. Read those two numbers side by side and you have the most honest signal in the Romanian market this cycle: wind is worth roughly half again to nearly double what solar is worth, and even at that price, supply is scarce.<\/p>\n
This is not a story about wind being expensive. It is a story about what a megawatt-hour is actually worth once the sun stops setting the price.<\/p>\n
In October 2025, the Ministry of Energy and grid operator Transelectrica launched a third auction under Romania’s EUR 3 billion CfD scheme, the 15-year support programme financed through the EU Modernisation Fund and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. This round was different from the first two: it was wind only, targeting 290 MW of new onshore capacity, with a price ceiling of EUR 80 per MWh.<\/p>\n
The reason it existed at all is the tell. The second auction in August 2025 offered 2 GW of wind capacity but selected only about 1.26 GW, because there were not enough qualifying bids below the ceiling. Solar, by contrast, was heavily contested and priced itself down to EUR 40.35 per MWh. So Romania came back with a wind-only round to recover the gap.<\/p>\n
It worked, but on wind’s terms. Bidders submitted projects totalling roughly 316 MW, above the minimum threshold, with strike prices ranging from EUR 59.95 to EUR 74.9 per MWh and commissioning targeted for 2028. Put the three rounds together and the pattern is consistent: wind has cleared near EUR 65 per MWh in round one, around EUR 73.89 per MWh on average in round two, and in the high fifties to mid seventies in round three, while solar has fallen toward the EUR 40 to 51 range. The gap is not noise. It is the price.<\/p>\n
Here is the part the solar headline hides. A strike price is not the cost of building a plant. It is the price a developer needs to make a project bankable given the revenue it expects to capture in the market. And the revenue a solar plant captures and the revenue a wind plant captures are diverging fast.<\/p>\n
The mechanism is called cannibalisation. Solar plants all produce at the same time, in the middle of the day, so as solar capacity grows, every new panel pushes midday prices down at exactly the hours solar is generating. The result is a falling capture rate, the share of the average market price that a technology actually earns. Across Central and Eastern Europe, including Romania, solar capture rates had already fallen to roughly 63 to 66 percent of baseload by 2024, and analysts now put solar capture in several major European markets at only 50 to 60 percent of baseload. Negative price hours, which fall almost entirely on solar, have been surging across the continent. In Spain in 2025, solar captured only about 54 percent of the average price.<\/p>\n
Wind behaves differently. It generates through the night, in winter, and in the evening peak, hours when solar is absent and prices are higher. Its output is far less correlated with its own glut, so it holds a materially higher capture rate, and that gap is widening as solar saturates. This is what the market calls the value of the wind megawatt. A wind MWh and a solar MWh are not the same product, and 2026 is the year the price gap stopped being subtle.<\/p>\n
So when Romanian wind clears at EUR 60 to 75 while solar clears at EUR 40, the system is not overpaying for wind. It is paying for a different, more valuable shape of generation: power that arrives when the grid actually needs it, that is harder to cannibalise, and that, as the undersubscribed second round showed, is genuinely scarce.<\/p>\n
For anyone signing or pricing a Power Purchase Agreement, the implication is direct. A solar PPA looks cheap on the headline price per MWh, but its merchant tail is exposed to exactly the capture erosion described above. A wind PPA costs more per MWh and is worth more, because the energy is delivered into higher-value hours and the contract holds its value better as renewable penetration rises. The smart structures in 2026 are not solar or wind. They are wind plus solar plus storage, blended so the portfolio captures value across the whole day rather than crowding into the midday trough.<\/p>\n
This is also why corporate buyers are moving toward wind for baseload-style cover. Rezolv Energy’s 10-year virtual PPA to supply Bekaert with 100 GWh of wind power a year from 2026 is a template, not an outlier.<\/p>\n
A price signal only matters where the resource and the framework exist to act on it. Romania has both, and on wind specifically the case is strong.<\/p>\n
Romania already has about 3 GW of onshore wind supplying roughly 16 percent of its electricity, yet it built very little in the last decade and now wants to lift wind to 36 percent of the mix by 2030. The raw resource is among the best on the continent. The Dobrogea region, made up of Constanta and Tulcea counties on the Black Sea, has the second highest onshore wind potential in Europe, and the country is home to Fantanele-Cogealac, for years the largest onshore wind farm in Europe at 600 MW. Onshore potential is estimated at around 14 GW, and grid connection requests have reached roughly 22.8 GW, a clear sign of investor appetite that the system is now racing to accommodate.<\/p>\n
The pipeline backs this up. Rezolv Energy’s Dunarea East project won a CfD for 300 MW, its VIFOR wind farm in Buzau runs to 461 MW, and developers including Engie, Eurowind, OX2, Qair and others are active in the wind rounds. Then there is the frontier: the World Bank estimates Romania’s Black Sea offshore wind potential at well over 70 GW, the country has a dedicated offshore law in place, a 3 GW offshore target by 2035, and a roadmap pointing to up to EUR 19 billion of investment. Add the EUR 3 billion CfD backstop that gives 15-year price certainty, and Romania offers something rare: a top-tier wind resource, a credible support mechanism, deep corporate PPA demand, and an offshore upside most of Europe cannot match.<\/p>\n
The third auction did not just fill a quota. It confirmed that in the country with one of Europe’s best wind belts, the market is willing to pay what wind is genuinely worth.<\/p>\n
At Momentum Energy, we read the third CfD auction as the clearest pricing signal Romania has produced this cycle, and we think most of the market misread it by celebrating cheap solar while underweighting what scarce, high-value wind was telling them.<\/p>\n
Our view is that the winners of the next phase will be the buyers and developers who price by captured value, not by headline cost per MWh. Solar will remain essential, and the cheapest energy by the clock, but its merchant economics are softening exactly where wind’s are firming. The contracts and portfolios that blend wind, solar and storage, and that treat a wind MWh as the higher-value product it has become, will outperform.<\/p>\n
We believe Romania, and the Dobrogea wind belt in particular, is one of the strongest places in Europe to build, contract, and finance wind right now. We are positioning accordingly: helping partners structure PPAs and projects that capture the value the third auction just confirmed, rather than chasing a headline price that the market is quietly repricing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The headline number from Romania’s renewable auctions was solar. It is easy to see why. In the second Contracts for Difference round in August 2025, solar cleared at a startling EUR 40.35 per MWh, one of the lowest strike prices anywhere in Europe. Cue the celebration: solar is now the cheapest electron in the room.… While Everyone Watched Solar, Romania’s Third CfD Auction Just Told You What Wind Is Really Worth in 2026<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":100,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2430,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425\/revisions\/2430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/momentumgroup.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}