Christian Kettel-Thomsen, vice president of the European Investment Bank, the financial arm of the European Union, said the bank is in direct contact with investors interested in power generation projects in Romania. He also said that half of the loans offered by the institution should be directed to support the transition to green energy.

“In the case of energy, we would like to do more than we have achieved so far and we are in contact with a number of investors interested in financing energy generation, especially in Romania. We strongly welcome the fact that the government has taken into account recommendations, which come – for example – from the operational group within the National Bank of Romania,” he said.

“For the most part, we are a demand-driven bank: the customer comes to us and we finance the perspective aspects. I think that the investments we made last year in Romania were a little under one billion euros and we will have the ambition to stay at least around that amount. Every year, the annual loans we offer are of 60-65 billion euros, but half of that amount should go towards financing projects that directly reduce emissions. The whole amount should be aligned with the new EU taxonomy. It is a rather ambitious project and we see Romania as part of it,” added Christian Kettel-Thomsen, according to zf.ro.

“This large imbalance between gas supply and demand, which has dramatically increased prices, underscores the importance of continuing the energy transition (…) We see that we need to address all of these issues, as we can use energy more efficiently. We see many opportunities in this regard, some of them here in Romania: we could use less energy in industry and companies, as well as in the residential sector. So it’s a huge potential for energy efficiency. The European Investment Bank has taken part in this.

“We should increase Europe’s capacity to generate energy, and I think this is a very good time to do that because the costs of installing solar and wind systems are constantly falling and are now quite competitive. So we need to move forward in improving energy supply processes in Europe in order to stabilize and reduce prices in the medium and long term,” he said.