Romania’s Ministry of Energy is releasing calls for projects worth about EUR 450 million to support the energy-intensive industry and Romania’s economic competitiveness, Energy Minister Sebastian Burduja said on Monday at a specialist event.
„What do we do for the energy-intensive industry, how do we actually support Romania’s economic competitiveness? In recent weeks, the Ministry of Energy released and will release calls for projects worth about EUR 450 million – and I mean two very important calls for projects. (…) It is about energy efficiency for the Romanian industry, EUR 150 million. We are going to make this call, but everything is in place, including the request for an opinion from DG Competition. It targets projects of up to EUR 30 million to replace equipment that is not energy efficient. It is a call based on the success of a similar one under the National Resilience and Recovery Plan (PNRR). There we collected 48 much smaller projects, capped at EUR 2 million, and those were companies that replaced their production lines or various equipment and, thus, obtain savings on the bill and greater energy efficiency, therefore reduced CO2 emissions. The new call drawing from the Modernisation Fund envisages larger grants capped at EUR 30 million, so that the large companies in the Romanian industry will find this call attractive and will also be able to replace their equipment and have significantly lower utility bills,” Burduja told the Energy Forum organised by Financial Intelligence.
According to him, an important call is also the one for self-consumption, with a budget in excess of EUR 300 million.
„The call for own consumption projects is also very important. There we have significantly improved the conditions, including in terms of mortgages for the completion of the projects – and we are preparing for a relaunch for the budget difference. It is about over EUR 300 million euros, so companies in Romania that have land available, that have a project for a photovoltaic park or in rarer cases wind power plants or maybe even micro-hydropower plants, through which to support part of their consumption, will be extended over EUR 300 million. In total, there are EUR 450 million for efficiency in industry, for a better competitiveness of Romania,” the minister added.
At the same time, he mentioned that this year the Energy Ministry has set an „extremely ambitious” target of 2,500 new MW that will be put into operation.
AGERPRES
