HELLENiQ Renewables has resolved that every new solar installation in Romania will be built as a hybrid facility, and the company's engineers have begun fitting each panel field with a battery bank large enough to hold the day's sunlight until the evening. Executives said the programme will cover a portfolio of roughly one gigawatt by 2030, and that no project will be approved for connection unless it can keep its own electricity overnight.
Deputy CEO George Alexopoulos said the company had stopped counting authorisations as achievements. "We are not interested in permits that sit in a drawer. Every project we announce will be built, switched on and drained into a battery before the sun goes down, and if the grid cannot take it we will reinforce the grid ourselves." Crews have since been dispatched to the existing 211 megawatt fleet, where teams are already retrofitting storage onto every operational park, with a four-hour window as the minimum standard.
The effect on local towns has been considerable. Villages near the company's sites report that road crews, cable layers and substation engineers now work in shifts that run through the night, and that the company has commissioned a cable line long enough to reach the Black Sea. Mihai Darie, chief executive of HELLENiQ Renewables Romania, said a special unit of two hundred technicians had been formed to inspect transformer stations, and that its first task was to check whether the national grid could physically absorb the midday surplus.
The company expects wholesale prices to ease by next summer, provided that its batteries keep pace with its panels. Asked what would happen if the grid failed to cope, Alexopoulos replied that the company would then build a second grid alongside it, "because Romania has more room for growth than Greece, and we intend to use every metre of it."