Corina Murafa: So far the just transition is a missed opportunity in Romania
An interview with the leading Romanian expert on just transition about the challenges and accomplishments of the decarbonization process in Romania, about the political factors in this process, the issues related to energy poverty, the energy aspects that deal with hydro, wind and nuclear plants, Romania’s energy ambitions and how much of them can be expected to turn into reality in a foreseeable future.
Dr. Corina Murafa is an independent public policy expert, activist and university lecturer in climate, energy and sustainability. She has been collaborating with large non-profit, public and private organisations, such as the World Bank, European Commission, Frankfurt School of Management, Ashoka, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Prime Minister’s Office, OMV Petrom, Deloitte, and various other national governments, NGOs and think tanks.
Since 2023 she has been giving a voice to civil society organisations working on climate and energy in Brussels, as a member of the European Economic Council after having served a similar position at national level in the past four years. Her work focuses mostly on the just energy transition, energy poverty and ESG transformations in corporations. She is a member of the Romanian Energy Poverty Observatory and a lecturer, PhD, at the Faculty of Business Administration at Bucharest University of Economic Studies, having a solid academic background through studies and long-term fellowships in energy and climate economics and policy at UC Berkeley, Hertie School of Governance, New York University, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies.
The interview took place on 30 December 2024.
Malgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat: A number of Romanian industrial regions – Dolj, Galaţi, Gorj, Hunedoara (including the Jiu Valley), Mureş and Prahova – were qualified to receive European funding within the framework of the Just Transition Fund. As an expert on just and sustainable transition, you have not only followed what happened next, but you have been involved in the process from the very beginning, from the moment of creation of the just transition territorial plans. What are your thoughts more than a year after this funding was allocated to Romania?
Which regions are doing well, which less well? What are the main challenges for the whole process?
I think it is a missed opportunity across the board – in all the regions concerned. I do not think there is any region doing better than the others in terms of absorbing the funds or even creating alternative narratives for the local community, unfortunately. I think we are the worst in Europe in terms of absorbing these funds. I also believe that we really lack a shared, common and coherent vision of the transition path for these regions and for Romania in general.
One of the big obstacles that I have seen over the last few years is the fact that, despite the existence of the funds, there have been many mixed messages from our politicians about the future of coal as an energy source. There have been various attempts to postpone the transition process and many statements that it is too early to phase coal out.
We have an energy policy that is very much tied to gas. A transition from coal to gas is not ideal, but that’s exactly what the Romanian politicians have in mind. As a result, despite the efforts of civil society organisations at the local level to create alternative narratives and pathways, local communities do not believe in the just transition process and in energy diversification.
Another challenge is a very strong disconnection between the central level of governance and the regional and local levels. The coal regions all have different socio-economic scars from the past. Given the low capacity of public administration, it would be far from realistic to believe that they would identify investment opportunities and make big strategic projects all by themselves. And unfortunately, they have not gotten enough support from the central government to direct some strategic investments there and to sketch strategic projects to help them find alternatives. They have been left on their own.
Does it mean that no breakthrough has been achieved by Romania during more than two years since the allocation of Just Transition Funding was announced first?
At the moment, unfortunately, the programme is dysfunctional. The management committee, the monitoring committee of the programme, which is made up of business associations, trade unions, civil society organisations, is unable to take decisions on new funding guidelines for the programme. The only guidelines that have been adopted and implemented so far are the guidelines on support for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). And even those have been significantly flawed because of the lack of political will, but also because of the lack of local capacity to come up with projects that embody the new, green economy.
As a result, Romania is unable to tailor the guidelines for new, productive, innovative investment. What we see on the ground are the old recycled project ideas from previous EU funds and EU-funded programmes, like the Regional Operational Programme.
What kind of projects do we speak about?
There are, for example, projects to open a guesthouse, a hotel, a restaurant – which actually mean that a private house is to be refurbished and a local entrepreneur will be a little bit richer. There is no new and innovative emerging entrepreneurial trend in any of the regions in question. Instead, there is a lot of mismanagement of funds. Quite unfortunate, to say the least.
I have kept in touch with a lot of people within the system who worked with me on this topic in Romania. All of them, whether they are still in the public administration or whether they have left – they are extremely disappointed. They are saying that nobody loves this programme and nobody wants this programme. A complete failure is looming and I am very pessimistic about the future. If you look at the calendar, you will realize that the Next Generation money has to be spent very quickly – and therefore it is completely impossible to imagine that it will be spent properly.
But the problem concerning just transition as a process is not limited to Romania only. It is a pan-European problem. We speak of a concept which is anchored in a funding mechanism, but not in a political and policy framework. That is a big problem, because the Just Transition Fund is not going to stay with us forever. We have put all our efforts into something which consists of pumping money into the selected regions, without having a more nuanced policy approach to just transition, without having any observatory, monitoring or forecasting mechanisms.
The Just Transition Fund has only been a fund governed by EU regulation and anything more. Meanwhile, there is a recognition on the part of academics, but also on the part of policy professionals in ministries and public administration, and even on the part of some politicians, that we need a policy framework and that the issue of just transition is definitely much broader than just coal regions. There are people who understand that – but the policy framework still has not been created.
Can we expect to see steps towards its creation soon?
Given the insecurity in the EU energy market related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also the rise of conservative parties everywhere in Europe, the idea of just transition has suffered a number of blows. Shortly before, the just transition concept gained momentum and people started to believe that we need the transition. And then there came the right-wing parties with their visions that the transition cannot be done and that the decision to phase out coal had been made in a hasty way.
Could the recent political turmoil in Romania have a negative impact on the issue?
The negative impact has already been felt. In 2024, the Romanians voted in a whole series of elections. We went through a perpetual election campaign, which meant that all the messages of populist rhetoric were very catchy. Everybody used them. All the politicians used the EU as a scapegoat for all the bad economic situations that people have experienced.
Even the most pro-European parties in Romania hinted that the EU was asking us to do this or that, and that Romania’s interests were not properly asserted in the EU decisions. Many times we heard that coal and gas were of highest importance. But there is worse than just words: the person who ended up running the Management Authority for the programme last year is actually a far-right politician who ran for the EU Parliament and then for the Senate on behalf of the far-right AUR party. It looks like the programme was deliberately blocked. Just imagine that: a person who was supposed to coordinate the disbursement of the just transition fund was running for the party campaigning against the transition. In my opinion, it was a very clear conflict of interest.
Summing up, there are both general challenges to the just transition process, which are valid in more countries, and at the same time Romania has its own specific issues.
The coal regions of Romania are usually the regions that were negatively affected during the first transition in the 90s, the passage to market economy. Do you think these regions can ever achieve prosperity? Can they ever heal the wounds of the social collapse that has already happened, like in the Jiu Valley?
They will never become poles of growth or poles of innovation. This is just rhetoric that we sometimes fool ourselves with.
Jiu Valley’s life used to be organized exclusively around coal mining. After a wave of layoffs in the 90s, the region is struggling to find new sources for development and improvement of living conditions / photo by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat
What can be done is to improve living conditions. They can provide better quality of life and better services for the people who have stayed there. I do not think they are doomed. I have seen small communities in Romania recover after periods of industrial decline which we have seen everywhere in Romania since the 90s. Yes, the decline has been more serious in the Jiu Valley and in Gorj, but the decline happened in the whole of Romania. And there are regions that are somehow doing much better than others – such as Reșița, Arad and many more.
The coal regions are not going to be champions, but it is unfair to abandon them and condemn them to a truly abysmal level of underdevelopment. In Petroșani, you will see people living in terrible poverty, using rubbish and second-hand clothes for heating their homes. This is something that should – and can – be improved.
There are many different actors involved in the just transition projects and in the implementation of the whole just transition concept. You have suggested that the Romanian political class is not particularly engaged here and that instead of presenting a vision of a post-coal economy, they are talking about further exploitation of coal. How do you assess the efforts of other stakeholders – business circles on the one hand and workers’ organizations, trade unions on the other?
I would like to add something about the political level as well. The process has worked better in some regions where there has been more cross-sectoral cooperation between actors, more local initiative in decision-making and more decentralisation.
A lot of the programme in Romania is managed by the Ministry of European Investments and Projects, on a central level. But this ministry alone cannot solve all the issues. They do not decide energy policy, nor economic policy. As such, they are unable to create synergies between different funding streams and different policies. It has been a problem, because the Ministry of Energy, which actually keeps a lot of money from the Modernisation Fund, has never been involved in Just Transition Fund-related activities. Their cooperation with The Ministry of European Investment and Projects has been very limited. In fact, any inter-ministerial cooperation is very limited in Romania in general, and this has also had a negative impact on the programme.
Romania was supposed to have an inter-ministerial committee on transition led by the Ministry of Economy, with other ministries, but also business organisations, trade unions and civil society on board. That committee has never met. It is just fiction on paper. Imagine, it is a milestone in the Resilience and Recovery Facilities, and it has never actually worked.
As for the trade unions, in my view they have never understood the meaning of the transition fund. There is very little union involvement in the monitoring committee. When the just transition plans were being drawn up, they simply wanted to block the process. They exaggerated the consequences and did not think proactively. I have seen different just transition observatories and different steering committees in other EU countries, where the trade unions were much more present. In Romania they have been very absent.
And the business associations? At the local level, the business community is very underdeveloped in Romania. They have not participated very much either. And at the level of the central administration and the big national business associations, there is not much interest in the whole process, because they see it primarily as an opportunity for small and medium business. They were more interested at the beginning of the programme when they also saw it as an opportunity for large companies to tap into the funds, but then they gradually withdrew from the process. Perhaps the only exception, the only business association that has offered a good input, is the Women Entrepreneurs’ Association. The biggest business alliances like Concordia have not been involved at all, because they have not seen an opportunity for their members. The big companies based in the coal regions, in their turn, realised very early in the process that they were not going to be able to get any funds themselves, at least not for business as usual, so they stopped caring about the process.
In the end, it turns out that neither workers, nor employers participated actively in the just transition process in Romania.
A mural in Petrosani hints at Jiu Valley’s history and post-coal future. Yet, the transition reality on the ground is less colourful than the artwork / photo by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat
Have there been any attempts at the central or regional level to educate society about the importance of the energy transition, or the fact that coal will have to be phased out at some point?
This is another big problem. As a society, we have also missed this opportunity in terms of awareness raising, education, and capacity building. Even though we had EU money to do it! There has been a very solid stream of funding for so-called ‘Technical Assistance’, which offered opportunities to involve the NGOs and civil society in the process and to do education campaigns. Believe it or not – a year after the regions submitted the first ideas for funding to the central Management Authority for funding, they have not even got a response. It is unbelievable how badly this programme has been managed at central level – the country has a reserve for technical assistance. These funds are not a matter of competition. Why wait one year to evaluate a project when there is only one candidate?
The central government has done nothing. The public information available on the website of the Ministries of Environment or the Ministry of European Investments and Projects looks terrible – like in the 1990s. The politicians were speaking much more often about the Recovery and Resilience plan than about anything related to just transition.
But if the opportunities are missed, the socio-economic impact of the disappearance of carbon-intensive industries in Romania will be terrible, in fact. Why does no one care?
In fact, people refuse to believe that these industries will disappear. The mainstream narrative in Romania goes that we will save these industries, that they will undergo a certain transformation by their own means and that the jobs will be kept. Nobody is facing the reality, because no politician and no company wants to admit that there will be job losses.
The Ministry of Energy has been saying that Hunedoara and Oltenia energy complexes will continue working, that hydrogen production could be launched there, and that the new energy sources would allow us to keep all the workers, all the jobs. But if you talk to the ministry officials in private, they will admit that this is impossible.
We do not even know what new companies will be created. How can they promise that thousands of people will find employment? Even if the new companies arise, they will be created under completely different parameters.
Blocks of flats in Petrila waiting for renovation / photo by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat
The Ministry of Energy in Romania has actually made a lot of announcements about big energy-related projects, including wind power in the Black Sea. What is going on in this area?
I think that the Ministry of Energy has not done a bad job recently in terms of funding the energy transition from the Modernisation Fund. What they have not done is to target that money at the regional level, but it has not been their mandate to do so.
Perhaps the Just Transition Fund should have been operated by the Ministry of Energy, or perhaps there should be a dedicated Ministry of Ecological Transition, like in France. The Ministry of Energy turned out to be a better fund manager than the Ministry of European Investments and Projects. Unfortunately, they do not manage the just transition related projects and the coal regions have not been specifically supported by the Ministry of Energy at all.
But the problem I have with the Ministry of Energy is that they are chasing too many rabbits at the same time. They want to be wind champions, solar champions, to empower consumers and to have local natural gas, and nuclear as well. And, in addition, they want to keep coal as the backbone. I think they are spreading themselves too thin. They do not have a proper vision of the transition, which would also include an understanding that there would be job losses and deep restructuration.
Vladimir Mitev: You mentioned prosumers, and I think Romania has done a good job in this area, with 150,000 prosumers by September 2024. That’s an example of decentralisation or empowerment of citizens, but it has also been criticised because prosumers come mostly from the middle class or people with higher income. I was wondering what is going on in terms of energy policy with regard to energy poverty, or with regard to the so-called energy communities.
How is Romania doing in that respect?
That’s a very big conversation.
On prosumers in general – you are very right. Prosumers have been one of the success stories of Romania, despite the fact that they are not particularly well reimbursed by the mechanism, it is not exactly a one-to-one compensation. Nevertheless, there are now about 1.5-2,000 megawatts installed by prosumers alone, which is huge – more than our two nuclear reactors. What is very interesting is that only a third of this capacity has been installed with public money. The other two thirds have been installed with private money, which means that there is actually an appetite among small businesses, upper middle class and middle class people to use their own money to become more energy independent. The main problem with the public funding, the Casa Verde, as you pointed out, is that there was no social criterion for the disbursement of that money, and that meant that de facto the upper middle class got it. There was also a very low credibility of the programme. The money was distributed according to the first come, first served rule. As a result, internet hackers actually showed up to help people fill out a form in 30 seconds using chatbots.
There has been a very high level of resistance to the system, even though civil society organisations have been lobbying for a long time that any public money given to consumers should somehow be earmarked for the energy poor, for social objectives and so on. There has been a very strong resistance from the system to that, and that’s because the system is not controlled by the poor, but by upper middle class people, who obviously favour their own class. I have had interesting conversations with senior officials about this. They told me: Why should we target the poor? Because if we manage to get this money out there and give it to the most capable, the upper middle class, they will use it well, they will even install additional capacity with their own money, and so prices will come down for everyone.
On the contrary, if you talk to many local public administration officials, you will often hear that the poor people do not want to work and just drink their welfare benefits in the local pub. It took us a very long time to lobby and this is where the Commission was very supportive of having a social criterion behind part of the RRF, part of the Repower EU funding that should go to consumers and to individuals, for building rehabilitation and building energy efficiency works in individual households. We, as civil society organisations, formed a coalition, lobbied hard for this and we were successful.
About 400 million euros will be spent on decentralised individual solar PV, but also on building refurbishment for households. But the devil is in the details – the mechanism behind the functioning of this funding mechanism is extremely complicated. There is a very high risk that this fund will not be directed to poor households, because it is very complicated to identify and support them. And there is a caveat in the mechanism that says: if the money is not used by the poor by this deadline, it should be used by everybody else.
For me, the main problem, however, is the fact that there is no proper energy identification for consumers in Romania at the moment. And this has to do with the fact that, again, we do not have an action plan for energy poverty, although this has been a legal obligation for the government for over 10 years. We have a legal definition which is not operational. This means we do not have a proper identification of those who are qualified. And when the energy crisis came, what happened was that everybody was protected. The cap and compensation mechanism was applied universally. So in the last two years in Romania everybody has benefited from regulated retail prices for both gas and electricity, because the government could not properly identify those who were most in need. And a system in which everyone is protected is not just, and it is also very expensive.
Now in the think tank that I am a member of and co-founder of, the Romanian Energy Poverty Observatory, we’re advocating a new, more inclusive and rational mechanism for identifying and targeting energy-poor households and vulnerable energy consumers, because the universal system is both inefficient and unfair. If we had a proper cross-institutional, cross-cutting database, we would also be able to target other subsidies more efficiently, such as the solar PV subsidy. Imagine – if ⅔ of the current capacity has been installed by people with their own money, imagine how much more leverage you would have had for the public money if you either targeted it at poor households with a 100% subsidy, or create a subsidy mechanism: if your income is high, you have to pay 50%. If your income is low, you have to pay 10% of the total cost of the PV. You just get much better value for money if you target the energy poor properly. Let us hope that by March, by April 2025, when this current mechanism expires, let us hope that our dialogue with the government is successful and we have a more nuanced system to protect vulnerable households.
I have been very involved in the issue of energy communities in Romania. What is happening is that we have adopted, we have transposed the EU directive ( REDD2), which defines the energy community, but the transposition has been nothing more than a translation of the directive and there has not been any secondary legislation adopted to create an enabling framework for energy communities. At the moment, energy cannot be shared within an energy community.
For example, if a multi-storey building with several families living in it, installs solar PV on its roof, the only consumption that they can cover with this common production is the common consumption, which is peanuts compared to the individual consumption within the apartments. But because there is no legislation adopted by the regulator that says what the allocation code should be for the distribution of this self-produced energy to the members of the community, the process is blocked in Romania. The only energy communities that are working, are working because they have bypassed the legislation. They work in a very limited way, so they only cover collective consumption, or they are actually, in addition to their community status, also energy suppliers, so they have a supply licence, which should not be a mandatory requirement for an energy community. I actually published a study on energy communities earlier this year with Greenpeace Romania, which was the first study on energy communities in Romania, showing the potential of the emerging initiatives. Based on this study, a lot of public pressure was created for a proper implementation of the directive, not just the translation.
Then, the Ministry of Energy created a working group with very different stakeholders to create this enabling framework, as the directive says, for energy communities. The working group has produced a sort of vision, but there is a lot of disagreement between the stakeholders on certain aspects, such as what is the role of a supplier in an energy community, or should there be lower distribution areas for energy communities, yes or no? Because inevitably, energy communities end up creating losses for some of the traditional actors, such as suppliers and distributors. And basically they refuse to accept these losses and they put all sorts of hurdles in the process. As a result, this working group set up by the Ministry of Energy could not reach a consensus on how to organise energy communities in Romania. What is happening now is that the Ministry of Energy has requested technical assistance from the European Commission in the form of this PSI instrument for independent consultants to come in and draft this legislation for energy communities in Romania. This will obviously lengthen the process, but hopefully it will at least get us somewhere. What the Ministry of Energy has done in the meantime, and this is very positive, is that they have started to put money into the market for energy communities.
Therefore, energy communities are functioning in a very limited way, but they are now being supported financially. There will soon be a programme for multi-family houses, blocks of flats, to get the free money from the Ministry of Energy to install solar PV on their roofs, again with a very limited form of benefit, just to cover the common consumption.
Hidroelectrica was listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange some time ago, and I was curious how such processes of listing on the stock exchange and attracting private investment in the energy sector help the general process of modernising the Romanian energy sector?
That’s a good question. I think the answer is that it has a limited impact, and I will explain why. Obviously, now that you have this free float package on the Bucharest Stock Exchange of Hidroelectrica, there are some new groups of shareholders coming in to oversee the management of the company.
Maybe some pension funds, maybe some institutional investors, some banks, whoever bought the shares, and I am talking about institutional investors, not ordinary citizens. I think it’s been a very good process to encourage individual savings and to encourage more responsible behaviour by citizens in terms of their own private finances, because there have been a lot of ordinary citizens who have bought shares in Hidroelectrica, but obviously they are not involved in the management of the company. They do not attend the general meetings, although they could, right?
In terms of really improving corporate governance and modernising these companies, we would still have to rely on these institutional investors. But because their packages are very limited, the institutional investors with minority stakes have no real say in the decision-making process of the company. The state still has a solid majority stake, which means that the state still does what it wants with Hidroelectrica, just like with all state-owned companies. And the state’s policy here has been primarily to use these companies as cash cows for dividends to fill the public budget deficit. All these companies, Hidroelectrica included, have typically given 90% of their profits to the state as dividends. They saved just very little money for investment, while Hidroelectrica could have gone with its own capital, with organic financing, into very interesting business lines, into diversifying its energy sources for production, perhaps into different supply markets and so on.
Instead, the company has been very aggressive in the domestic supply market, but that’s only because they have been fulfilling the social policy of the state. They were told to sell energy cheaply to drive down market prices. As a supplier, they were selling energy below the actual cap for the end users. This is the government’s policy to use a state-owned company to keep prices in the system a little bit lower. This is arguably a legitimate government objective, but I am not sure that it should be fulfilled through the government’s position as a shareholder in these companies. It should be achieved through other mechanisms that are more market and policy driven. If this state of things does not change, Hidroelectrica will never turn into a vehicle for modernising the country’s energy system.
Malgorzata Kulbaczeska-Figat: You have been working with authorities in a number of countries, not only in Romania, on transition plans. Do you notice any peculiarities of the Romanian situation or any reasons why the just transition might be more difficult in Romania than elsewhere? Or are the problems similar everywhere you have worked?
Politicisation of the process and the actual hijacking of the process by the right-wing party which, as I told you, had its candidate as the head of the Managing Authority, is very specific to Romania.
I think the best comparison I can make is with Poland, where I have worked mostly. One big difference, which is very significant, is the level of centralisation. The process is more decentralised and the fund is more decentralised in Poland. It has to do with our constitutional framework. Romania is divided into 42 counties which have more limited constitutional powers. The eight regions interested in just transition do not have proper possibilities. In Poland, regions such as Upper Silesia or Eastern Wielkopolska got not only the money, but also a lot of freedom in using them. In my opinion, this led to better results because the money was programmed in a more collaborative way. The process did not work properly in Romania.
Another difference is the level of experience in using EU funds and the competence of the public administration. So if I were to compare Poland and Romania, and this is not just my assessment, Poland’s public administration is much more competent than ours, which means that the process was better managed. The meetings of stakeholders were better organised. Upper Silesia, for example, created a Just Transition Observatory, which is very participatory, with many stakeholders involved. They knew how to get on board some ‘difficult’ stakeholders like trade unions. The level of experience of using EU funds properly was much greater in Poland than in Romania.
This has also had an impact on the Just Transition Fund. In Poland, regions like Eastern Wielkopolska, had a just transition vision even before the just transition fund came into being. They even had a just transition booklet, drafted by local stakeholders, about what they want to invest in and how they want to transform the region. When the fund came, the Polish regions were able to come up with a number of very well defined strategic investment projects that they probably had in their drawers from other programmes, but found the perfect funding opportunity only at that moment.
I know that Upper Silesia had used the funds for economic diversification and enterprise development. Of course, some of it was awarded competitively, but most of it was actually awarded to 20 or 25 strategic projects that were very well established, very clearly designed, long before the process was completed. So that made a big difference because in Romania, when we started the process, these regions had no idea what they wanted to invest in, what they wanted to support. They had no ready-made projects, no strategic investment projects, etc.
Then another difference that I noticed, especially in Portugal, is the involvement of different local actors, such as local educational institutions. I worked in Portugal in Abrantes, a coal region much smaller in terms of implications of the transition than we have in Romania.
But there, for example, the local technical vocational schools, the local universities, even some local entrepreneurial centres were very much involved in the process. They already existed as actors who could contribute in some way, whereas we did not have that in Romania. The local universities were clueless, especially in the coal regions. Trade unions in Poland, too, see the changes as an opportunity. In Romania, they don’t.
Vladimir Mitev: I would like to ask a little bit more about the perspective of Romania as an energy centre. Romania has great ambitions in the energy sector. For example, it wants to be the largest producer of natural gas in the region. It wants to be influential in the supply of electricity and natural gas to Moldova and Ukraine, it also wants to be a hub towards Bulgaria, it could be a hub towards Slovakia and Hungary in the area of natural gas. There are also plans for more nuclear power plants, I remember a discussion about modular nuclear power plants. Perhaps the list could be continued with the wind farms and not only.
So, Romania is ambitious in the field of energy. I was wondering, how do you see the situation of the Romanian energy sector in a few years? What could be the situation, maybe also in regional terms, the place of Romania within the region? And also what would be the situation after a few years of all these processes that are going on now, processes of supposed modernisation?
A lot of these processes and a lot of these plans that you have mentioned are very much state-driven, state-owned, state-led. And I think these plans are going to fail. They’ve been on paper for many years and they have never been properly implemented.
The ambition to become a regional energy hub has been included in the national energy strategy for 15 years. And what has happened? If you look at things, we are now a net importer of electricity, instead of being an exporter, and that has been going on for two or three years. All these big plans, which are again in the hands of the state, like nuclear, small modular reactors, etc., are not going to happen. This is because the state has very limited capacity to implement them. The projects that are driven by the private sector, like natural gas in the Black Sea, which is driven by OMV, which is an Austrian state-owned company. I think they will be more successful.
The same goes for other visions and aspects that are in the hands of private actors, like wind, energy communities, etc. Other big plans that are driven by the state I do not think we’re going to be successful with. Or, you know, they will be very lengthy, etc.
The big problem at the moment is the fact that we do not have enough grid capacity and we have not modernised the grid in general. And this is unfortunately an issue, an area where there’s a lot of state involvement. The TSO is a state-owned enterprise, many of the DSOs are still, you know, state-owned or very much regulated, and we have problems with improving the capacity of the grids to be able to handle this huge transition that we’re heading towards.
Bulgaria and Romania have been discussing for decades, going back to socialist times, about a joint dam on the Danube at Nikopol. What the prospects are for such a project? I also know that there is some European interest in such an initiative…
I do not know much about this particular initiative, about this particular project. What I do know are two things that might be relevant. One is that Romanian-Bulgarian cooperation in the field of energy is not great.
Romanian-Bulgarian cooperation in the diplomatic field in general is not great. We are neighbours with Bulgaria, but we are not great friends, supporters, investors, co-investors and so on. I can’t tell you why, but I don’t think we are on the best of terms with Bulgaria. As far as I know, there have also been some disputes with the Danube. We want more shipping on the Danube. The Bulgarians don’t want that or they want something else.
The second element is the future of hydropower in general.
What is the future of hydro in Europe? How much new hydropower capacity can we have, given the climate crisis, given the lower volumes of the Danube, et cetera? I do not have a study in front of me that confirms this intuition.
I think this is a very important step that should be taken: a very well written scientific study on the future of hydropower in Europe. Personally, I think that the future of hydropower is not fabulous because of the climate crisis. We have seen this in recent years, when hydropower installations have produced much less electricity than expected at peak times, in the summer and sometimes even in the winter. You can get more efficiency from old hydropower plants, like Porțile de Fier, but new hydropower, especially given, the climate crisis but also biodiversity constraints, I’m not sure that’s a viable prospect.
Cover photo: Lupeni mine, Jiu Valley. Photo by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat
This interview has been prepared with the support of Journalismfund, within the scope of a broader project concerning just transition in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Czechia in a comparative perspective.
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