Developer and IPP R.Power has received €15 million (US$15.6 million) in non-reimbursable state financing to build a 2-hour BESS project in Romania.
The independent power producer (IPP) announced the grant on business networking site LinkedIn last week (3 January), saying the RON74.6 million funding from the Ministry of Energy would go towards its first large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS).
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The project will have a power rating of 127MW and an energy storage capacity of 254MWh and, while it is one of the larger announced in Romania, R.Power didn’t say when it would come online (the largest we’ve reported on, by far, is a 2GWh project from another IPP, Monsson).
The funding comes from Romania’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), an EU-wide programme to help countries mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic’s negative economic effects, but which has increasingly funded clean energy and energy storage in recent years, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.
Romania is using the PNRR to back solar and storage projects and recently said that 18 projects totalling 2.5GWh of capacity would receive a share of €73.8 million in funding; R.Power’s is presumably one of those.
R.Power is headquartered in Warsaw, Poland – where Energy-Storage.news holds its annual Energy Storage Summit CEE – but is also active in Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany. It sells some of its projects but also brings some into operation itself.
The company was among those with BESS projects that won in Poland’s recent capacity market (CM) auction, claiming 655MW/2.3GWh of projects won contracts amounting to revenues of PLN1.6 billion (US$394 million). A total of 2.5GW of CM obligations for BESS were handed out, though many projects only bid in part of their power capacity, so R.Power did not necessarily win a quarter of those obligations.
Renalfa acquires 258MW Romanian solar and BESS project
In related news, IPP Renalfa has acquired a 258MW solar project in Teleorman, Romania, which it expects to start commercial operation in 2027.
The project, to be built in Teleorman County on Romania’s southern border, will include 1GWh of co-located battery energy storage system (BESS) assets, although Renalfa has not provided further information on the products it plans to use in either the project’s solar or storage elements.
Romania plans to increase its domestic energy production capacity to 32GW by 2030, according to the most recent draft of its National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), although the government’s target of generating 38.3% of power from renewable sources is lower than the European Commission’s recommendation of 41%.
Renalfa is also the owner of the largest operational BESS project in Bulgaria, a 25MW/55MWh system that came online last year.
The section on Renalfa’s solar and BESS project is from an article originally posted on PV Tech.
