Andrei Manea, RPIA: “The bidding mechanism for CfD needs to be better thought out; two days for appeals, an impossible deadline”

“Usually, at the conferences, we notice that it is somehow like a custom: the minister comes, tells us how well the things are going, how extraordinary the future will be for Romania, another year passes, we find ourselves in the same position, 72 megawatts in wind power the year past and about 300 in photovoltaics. Another year will pass. We also have an electoral cycle to close this year, let’s see what happens in the future. I don’t want to be negative, but I would still like to have our moments of reality. Indeed, we will always be more optimistic, because we want to raise the country’s targets, we want to make money, because we represent the business. What is important in those studies is to see how we can achieve certain targets. What do we need? And here, indeed, unfortunately, we fall behind.

Today we have a strategy on the table, which is less ambitious than what we had in the past in the PNIESC, which takes us to 2035 with targets for 2030. We have a PNIESC that has not yet been released and a ten-year network development plan that does not it is correlated with these two. Basically, we have three big pieces that should be the pillars of Romanian energy. All the same page and they are not,” Andrei Manea, Executive Director Romanian Photovoltaic Industry Association (RPIA) said during Green Energy Conference organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“In addition, we have the European funds section which looks very good. Billions flow to Romania. The problem is in the implementation. Of the 1,000 MW that are on paper today from European funds, we have no visibility, and neither does the ministry have any idea how many are actually being built. I do not allow myself to enter into a discussion about the projects of the Romanian state, regardless of whether they are renewable energy or not. So, we have to see from these studies and strategies what is necessary to reach these targets. We go straight to the targets – gigawatts, gigawatts, gigawatts, but we ‘choke’ on the network. We are happy that we have a station – two, which have been inaugurated now, after years and years of investment. It’s very good stuff, but it’s not enough. The realistic time to obtain an ATR in Romania is one year and I don’t think anyone in the room can contradict me. This is the reality.

We now have a new connection regulation, which is a step forward. Unfortunately, we do not have visibility into future years. We will see what happens with the guarantees. It’s an industry proposal, after all it was implemented. We will see what effects it will have. To begin with, we see that there are inadvertences from the point of view of the network operators’ interpretation. We will see the next steps. For those who develop projects and want to build their own, we have the calendar with the auctions if we are talking about connection to the network. From the experience of other more advanced countries like us, Spain, which implemented this issue in 2020, did not launch the auction in 2024 either. It was a fiasco. We call for this auction mechanism to be a little better thought out, to talk more closely and see if it will help us or not. Perhaps it would be better to let a larger buffer for these guarantees to speak for themselves. The CfD is like an illusion: it comes, it doesn’t come. Looking at the timeline, until November 18th, it seems realistic. From my point of view, it is forced.

If you look at how much time the authorities have to decide who won this 1.5 GW, it is an extremely short time compared to what happened with the PNRR. For those of us who will apply, we have two days to appeal. You realize that it is impossible in two days. If the gentleman from European Funds or the consultant in charge fell ill, what do we do? There are issues that we understand that the Romanian state has assumed and must carry out, but at the same time, in order to have those megawatts we are talking about, and gigawatts, we must also be realistic: the network, the connection to the network, these European funds for which we have no visibility, what is being built and what is not being built.”