Investors want to block new green energy projects

Investors in the renewable energy sector asked the government to temporarily suspend the accreditations for new renewable energy plants, Romania Insider reports.

In an open letter sent to prime minister Victor Ponta, energy minister Andrei Dominic Gerea and energy authority ANRE, four renewable energy producers’ organizations have asked for urgent measures in order to avoid the industry’s collapse. They requested the state to increase the share of the renewable energy in the national energy mix. The government had reduced it for captive consumers from 17% to 12.5% in 2014 and has kept it at that level in 2015, the report said.

The reduction generated a surplus of green certificates, “which are now papers without value,” according to the producers’ associations. Romanian authorities avoid doing what all other governments did in similar situations, which is to suspend the access to the support scheme for the new projects until viable solutions are found, producers say, as reported on Romania-insider.com.

In 2013, Romania introduced retroactive regulatory changes that fundamentally changed the economics for existing installations. Mandatory acquisition quotas for tradable green certificates –defined by law till 2020 – were slashed drastically.