According to the data provided by the National Energy Dispatcher (DEN), the need for electricity storage is 4,000 MW by 2030, half of which will come from batteries and half from pumped storage hydropower plants, said the Minister of Energy, Sebastian Burduja.
“From the data provided to us by the National Energy Dispatcher within Transelectrica, what is needed is 4,000 megawatts of storage. DEN’s proposal is for half to come from batteries and half from pumped storage hydropower plants. And we told you that, on the of batteries, we have an ongoing call from the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan n.r), it is the first call in Romania, financed by the state, of 200 million euros, and it closes on April 21. So the evaluation and contracting will follow beneficiaries. Then we have two calls for production and self-consumption in the Fund, where if you install batteries, you have a bonus of 10 points. So the beneficiaries who will start applying from April 25, when the two calls are launched, with one total budget of 815 million euros, a generous budget, they will certainly be encouraged to install batteries and, last but not least, we are preparing a storage scheme from the Modernization Fund, with an estimated budget of half a billion euros , to join the Fall Committee of the Modernization Fund. It’s somewhere at the end of September. This means that until then we have to get the approval from the Competition Council, we have to approve the scheme at DG Competition, at the European Commission, and we can enter with approval at the EIB and then in the Modernization Fund. So that will be a dedicated scheme just for storage. In the future, depending on the performance of contracts for difference, a CFD scheme for storage can also be considered. From what I remember, the estimate is that by 2030 this would be the requirement (of 4,000 MW),” explained Burduja, according to Agerpres.
He added that Romania must do what it should have done for decades, namely pumped storage hydropower plants.
“We are the only country in the EU with the geography that allows such investments and which has not been able to complete such a hydropower plant. It is much more useful than a field of batteries. Much more useful because it stores energy for a period much longer and is much friendlier to the environment.(…) That is why I and the Council of Ministers in Brussels always say: give us a favorable framework for pumped storage hydropower plants through which we can speed up, on the one hand , the environmental approval procedures, on the other hand, to be able to access more financing because they are expensive projects and they are projects that are not done overnight,” said the Minister of Energy.
Regarding the pumped-storage hydropower plant project from Tarnița-Lăpusteşti, he mentioned that the feasibility study procedure is underway and if this fails, a public-private partnership option will be used.
“I’m not giving up, you know. It’s true, from what SAPE communicates, there is interest from the market. But if we don’t succeed even now, we’ll go for a public-private partnership option, but I don’t want to talk about it until I see the result of the procedure In the public-private partnership, there are large partners, with some of whom I have seen, they could enter from this moment. We do not have a feasibility study, they assume part of the costs and then when of SF, the stakes in the shareholding are being renegotiated. But we have no way to give up this investment,” pointed out Sebastian Burduja.