Construction is expected to begin next month in Romania on what backers claim will be Europe's largest onshore wind farm with an expected capacity of 600 megawatts.
Formed from the sale of two adjacent sites owned by renewable power developer Continental Wind Partners (CWP) to Czech utility company CEZ, the combined site will generate around 354 megawatts by the end of 2009, with the rest of the turbines expected to be in operation by the following year.
Situated in the Dobrogea province of Romania, around 117 kilometers from the Black Sea, the Fantanele and Cogealac sites will represent around 30 per cent of the renewable market in the country, which also includes large hydroelectric projects. The project was originally developed by CWP for Good Energies, an investor in renewable energy who procured the turbines for the project.
However despite the scale of the planned Dobrogea project, wind farm development has been very limited to date in Romania with only a handful of existing turbines offering around 7MW of capacity.
"There are about three turbines standing in Romania, very small ones, which you can just see in the distance from our site with a powerful pair of binoculars," said Andrew Lee, director of Good Energies. "Effectively Romania has no wind capacity at the moment."
Lee claimed the lack of investment in wind farms to date in Romania can be largely explained by the current legislative regime, which he argued does not encourage independent renewable power developers to invest. He said that Good Energies had wanted to back the scheme itself rather than sell to CEZ but had been forced to offload the project because Romania's green certificate incentive regime expires in 2012 despite repeated calls for the government to extend it.
"We are really somewhat disappointed not to be building this facility," he said. "We had waited 18 months for the parliament to renew the legislation and in the meantime companies such as CEZ and others were making strong pitches to us to buy the assets so eventually we decided to go down that route."
The Romanian green certificate scheme is similar to that which operates in the UK and was put in place around eight years ago for a ten year period. The Romanian government's slow action over renewing the scheme, meant that Good Energies was effectively forced to sell the project to a company which has a sufficiently large assets to be able to finance the project until the certificate scheme is eventually extended.
"If you are a utility and not having to use off-balance sheet debt financing, then you can make the investment anyway and finance it on your balance sheet because under European Law the Romanians will have to renew this tariff sooner or later," said Lee. "However we are not going to be able to borrow five hundred million from the bank at the moment."
The new backers are expecting to get around 35 per cent efficiency from the turbines, on a par with what would be expected from a similar scheme in Scotland.
Despite the size of the project, around 139 turbines initially, Good Energy claims that it faced little or no resistance from the local community about the facility. "It is a large facility but then the site is simply huge," said Lee. "It's in quite an empty part of the country and will be enormously beneficial to the local population, in terms of the rents farmers are getting for use of their land."
Good Energy is also setting up a charitable foundation, which it claims will be for the benefit of the local population.
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