“There won’t be another 1,000 MW of solar installed in Romania in one year, but there can be a market for an additional 300, 500 MW, in smaller installations. It will all depend on the feed-in tariff (regulated tariff i.e.),” says Marques, whose company has developed solar parks with a total capacity of 12 MW in Romania.
Photovoltaic parks mushroomed in Romania to several hundred in 2012-2013, because of a very generous support scheme, rewarding owners with a set number of green certificates for each megawatt hour of electricity fed into the grid. The certificates were then sold on the market and producers could get about EUR300 for each MWh generated, while selling the electricity directly only generated only up to EUR40 per MWh.
The installed capacity of PV parks surged from 49 MW at the end of 2012 to more than 1,000 MW by the end of 2013, according to the data of the national grid operator Transelectrica about the power plants cleared for the green power support scheme. At a standard cost of EUR1.55 million per MW installed, total solar PV investments in Romania amounted to more than EUR1.5 billion in two or three years.
Individual investors criticized the scheme, though, because getting and trading the certificates entailed too much red tape for a person to handle. The Romanian authorities intend to introduce a renewable energy support system, similar to the system already in place in European countries like Germany, where producers get paid feed-in tariffs for the power they supply to the grid.
“I think it is a totally different market from the one we had last year. As the next step, I am thinking of rooftop projects, where there is a clear link between production and consumption, meaning consumption is very close to the point of production, along with residential PV,” Oscar Marques said.
“There are two main issues that need to be clarified and which can boost this development in Romania. One of them is the still-expected feed-in tariff, but we don’t know what will come. The second has to do with net metering.”
Net metering is a system that allows a consumer to offset the amount of electricity used with the electricity their facility generates and feeds into the grid, enabling them to pay only the difference or get paid if production was higher than consumption.
“In principle it should come along. This is the common practice and the usual trend [in Europe].”
Investment is easier to make if net metering is a possibility but can be done even without it, Martifer Solar’s official said.
Martifer Solar is in talks with various investors for new rooftop projects to be installed in retail areas and production facilities, with the expectation that, by the time their implementation begins, the feed-in tariff situation will be clarified. The company is also working on some ground-mounted projects, which it expects to implement during the course of the year and be covered by the new scheme.
“Of course, the investors are already adapting to what is expected, so the projects are below 1 MW.”
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)