With an international background spanning law practice in Ciurtin & Associates, structured finance in international banks, and entrepreneurship since 1999, Adrian Ciurtin, Co-founder and Managing Director of Wiren Holding, brings a multi-layered perspective on the energy transition. At a time when Romania’s energy sector is reshaped by ambitious renewable targets, fiscal tightening, and fresh regulatory reforms, his insights are particularly relevant. From ANRE’s decisions on storage and grid access, to the government’s austerity policies and the Energy Minister’s plan to cut electricity prices, the business environment is shifting fast. How these measures affect capital flows, investor sentiment, and long-term opportunities is the conversation we explored with him.

 

Romania has just removed the so-called double taxation on storage and clarified the rules for grid connection. From an investor’s standpoint, do these changes provide enough legal certainty to unlock large-scale financing, or are there still hidden risks that discourage international capital?

Removing double taxation on storage and clarifying grid connection rules are important steps, addressing critical barriers and objections our investment team at Wiren has faced over the past five years. I often say within our group that regulation is either the beginning or the end of our business, which is why, through my law firm, we remain actively engaged in shaping relevant regulatory processes at both the European and national levels.

However, we already assessed that these measures on their own don’t largely unlock large-scale, low-cost capital for BESS. Our final investor’s price BESS – PV hybridized or stand-alone – not just on CAPEX and further OPEX, but on whether revenue stacking is clear, involving energy arbitrage, ancillary services, balancing, and possibly CfDs, PPAs – hybridized with profit-sharing or pure-merchant.

Banks will finance such investments if PPAs or CfDs are in place, but remain reluctant without a reliable sponsor, defined exit strategy, or strong guarantees. At the group level, we integrate projects sourced by our consulting arm, Wiren Devs, with co-investments structured by Wiren Investment and sponsorship provided by our EPC branch, Wiren Romania, unlocking project or construction debt and enabling final exits at COD.

The CfD scheme is another positive development, providing bankability and aligning Romania with this EU practice, but it also narrows the upside compared to merchant models and forces us and our investors to rethink risk allocation.

PNRR and Modernization Fund support help, yet delays in permitting, grid access, and licensing keep pushing projects down fragmented timelines, with synchronization and timing emerging as the biggest hidden risks. Ultimately, international capital will go big only when Romania demonstrates regulatory stability, transparent grid planning, and a mature market model for storage; until then, the strongest opportunities lie in distributed PV plus storage, where returns are more immediate and controllable. Nevertheless, my question to you remains: what is today the market-aligned value of a MW power of PV hybridized with 2- or 4-hour BESS at COD?

 

Minister Bogdan Ivan has promised to reduce electricity bills by up to 25% in the next year, relying on market mechanisms like the Market Maker, dynamic tariffs, and a central counterparty. Do you see these tools as sufficient to make energy “affordable” in Romania, and what risks might they pose for investors?

These measures are steps in the right direction, but they cannot alone trigger immediate affordability for consumers and communities, and make energy belong to everyone, as we always say in Wiren. Market making, dynamic tariffs, and a central counterparty will indeed bring more liquidity, transparency, and flexibility to the Romanian energy market, yet their real impact will take time – at least 12 months – given the complexity and high costs of implementation, particularly for smart metering.

In the meantime, the most immediate relief for consumers comes from accelerating PV and storage deployment, which directly reduces grid dependence and bills. For investors, however, the risks remain: Romania’s history of regulatory volatility, the uncertainty of how these new mechanisms will function in practice, and the need for significant grid reinforcement.

The EU’s new Affordable Energy Action Plan has a straight but also long-term impact, aiming to cut energy costs and boost efficiency for households and industry, while the proposed Clean Industrial Deal seeks to anchor EU member states as a hub for green technologies and circular business models. Together, they combine targeted state aid with updated competition rules to drive decarbonization investments without distorting the market.

Affordability will only be sustainable if these reforms are matched by long-term EU and national policy stability and infrastructure investment that makes both consumer bills and investor returns predictable. Diversified revenue streams, coupled with stronger alignment between the regulator, the TSO, and market players, will enable higher investor returns while safeguarding consumers from additional burdens.

 

The recent austerity package brought VAT hikes, higher excise duties, and continued pressure from Brussels to eliminate price caps. How does this new fiscal and legal environment affect Romania’s attractiveness for international funds looking at renewables or infrastructure projects?

The government’s fiscal tightening measures aimed at reducing the budget deficit certainly complicate the investment landscape. Higher VAT and excise duties feed into OPEX, consumer prices, and inflation, which erodes our big economic data and competitiveness among other countries.

The removal of price caps exposes households and SMEs to greater volatility, which reinforces Wiren’s mission to make energy available and affordable to everyone. With more awareness about their energy behaviors and real-life consequences, consumers take their own decision towards cost reduction and energy independence, through self-consumption by PV and storage installation, designed for their energy profile and contracted with modern solutions – dynamic prices, dedicated retail lending, Energy-as-a-Service where Wiren acts as an energy service company (ESCO), and various types of PPAs.

Our financing and support instruments, combined with the steady decline in technology costs, help offset the erosion of purchasing power of prosumers for integrated PV and BESS solutions, caused by near double-digit inflation.

Romania’s electricity market liberalization is seen by our co-investors as both an opportunity and a risk: on the one hand, it brings transparency, liquidity, real market pricing, the development of PPAs, and room for innovation in storage or aggregation, all of which can support long-term bankable business models; on the other hand, it entails volatility and the risk of administrative intervention when social imbalances arise (such as surging consumer prices seen in Europe in 2021-2022), meaning that its attractiveness ultimately depends on the stability and predictability of the liberalization rules.

In the end, the real issue for investors is predictability: international funds can price in higher taxes if they are stable and transparent, but they discount markets where the rules shift abruptly. Our concern is whether the Romanian government can anchor these measures in a clear medium-term fiscal strategy and market competitiveness; only then will international capital stay engaged.

 

Romania is negotiating to delay its coal phase-out to protect the security of supply. Do you think such tactical delays undermine investor confidence in the renewables agenda, or do they create a more stable runway for capital deployment?

​​With no doubts and total engagement, we share in Wiren the European Commission’s views that coal is unsustainable and incompatible with climate neutrality. Coal remains the most sensitive fault line in Romania’s transition.

I am nonetheless cautious about pushing for a rapid short-term phase-out of fossils, even supporting affected regions through Just Transition funds and other means to shift toward renewables, storage, and cleaner alternatives. The private sector is strongly engaged in this reshaping process.

On one hand, extending fossils’ life can be seen as pragmatic, by ensuring security of supply during a period when grid reinforcement, storage, and new RES capacity are still catching up. This can actually create a more stable runway for capital deployment, as investors prefer markets that balance ambition with realism.

Moreover, Romania’s current energy mix, still heavily reliant on gas and coal, will keep baseload prices elevated in the coming years. This sustained price floor is expected to lift capture prices for solar and wind as well, ensuring an attractive margin for investors in new renewable projects, particularly in solar.

In the short term, our investors are leveraging both the margins generated by this favorable energy mix and the state aids made available by the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the Just Transition Fund, and the Modernization Fund.

However, they prudently fear about the boomerang effect in the value chain of short-term oversupply of renewables, they experienced in other countries – generating volatility of the prices and grid, stalling of PPA market, highest curtailments so far (that are also impacting the PPA revenues), very high peak pricing to recuperate costs, high re-dispatching requirements affecting all stakeholders – RES producers (not being remunerated), TSO, consumers etc.

On the other hand, frequent shifts in coal phase-out timelines can raise questions about political commitment to decarbonization and weaken the credibility of long-term climate targets. The key is clarity: if delays are framed transparently as transitional for a very short period, with firm milestones for RES, storage, and grid upgrades, they need not undermine investor confidence. What investors fear most is not pragmatism, but unpredictability.

 

More than 1.200 projects, totaling around 60 GW, have valid grid connection permits, but only 11% are fully authorized. From your experience with complex transactions across sectors, what legal and contractual innovations could help Romania move faster from paper to steel in the ground?

Back in Romania’s first wave of renewables, a 50MW plant developed and sold by Wiren’s founders was the largest operational PV power plant, whereas today the size of leading projects is 10+ times bigger, reflecting the rapid growth of the market and investors/ financiers’ appetite.

From a regulatory and fiscal standpoint, the country has made important progress in 2025: clearer rules for grid connection and operation, the removal of double taxation for storage, and the successful implementation of the CfD scheme. These steps have created bankable opportunities that attract large-scale international capital.

 

Achievements of 2025 in RES and BESS are known and predictable to all stakeholders. What is next with these 1.200+ MW on-paper projects?

Projections look fine in 2026; solar projects in Romania are expected to enjoy their strongest profitability, as capture prices rise well above the LCOE on the back of high baseload prices, and while this margin gradually narrows over time, it remains attractive and healthy all the way to 2030.

The turning point is the selection of the viable RTB projects. Over the past three years, Wiren Devs’ consultancy team, working alongside our law firm to explore technical and legal remedies, has disqualified hundreds of projects, ultimately selecting only a limited number of RES and BESS developments deemed truly suitable. We proved that a viable RES/ hybrid project with the competent EPC team has the correct chances to attract required bridge equity and debt to reach COD towards a full exit at COD or COD plus 1-2Y of operation.

In 2025, such viable projects are still traded at RTB, but often at a discount, so developers look more than before for turnarounds through EPC and O&M partnerships (Joint Venture Agreements coupled with an end-goal agreed upon by the partners) or partial exits. Such an alliance, enriched with a main-technology supplier credit or leasing, is successfully addressing construction competencies, resources, and liquidity. I first introduced this joint venture model at renewable energy conferences in 2013 as a vehicle for co-creating IPPs, and it has since evolved into Wiren’s primary framework for investment and project co-development.

Alternatively, pre-contracted exits to large end-investors at COD provide early-stage liquidity and bankable collateral, while simultaneously enhancing the bridge bankability of RTB projects authorized for construction and divestment at COD.

As a prerequisite to stepping into construction or project finance, Wiren mandates the execution of operation agreements through aggregation (ANRE still to clarify uncertain or dysfunctional areas) or trading by a licensed third-party and of a comprehensive full-service maintenance contract, where it acts both as investor and maintenance provider.

In our today’s energy sector, maintenance increasingly takes the form of full-service agreements that cover an asset’s entire lifecycle, from predictive monitoring to rapid response. By pairing these contracts with tailored insurance mechanisms, operators and investors can protect both performance and revenues, turning maintenance into a strategic safeguard rather than just a technical necessity.

Co-located connection involving Wiren and other extra-group players requires closing of energy consortium agreements that govern co-investing, building, operating, and donating the substation and the grid connection.

These are notable examples that the misalignment currently evident in our sector among regulators, operators, developers, EPCs, technology providers, financiers, and investors could be mitigated through greater coordination and balanced agreements, enabling the construction and operation of viable RES and BESS projects.

Wiren serves as a reliable sponsor of this JV model and its associated lending mechanisms, bringing 15 years of extensive expertise in successful RES development, large subcontracting across Europe, full EPC delivery in SEE, debt financing, and investment. With deep knowledge of construction flows and constraints, market dynamics, and regulatory frameworks, we are able to generate accurate financial and contractual models grounded in projected CAPEX.

 

As someone who invests internationally, how do you compare Romania’s regulatory and fiscal predictability with neighboring markets in SEE? Is the country still punching above its weight, or is the competition catching up?

Most SEE countries remain attractive to investors thanks to a favorable power balance of solar and wind versus gas, coal, and, in some cases, nuclear. The gap between capture prices and LCOE for wind and solar is expected to be widest next year, most notably in Romania and Greece, where high baseload prices lift capture prices.

With a subsidiary in Serbia and a portfolio now exceeding 25 MW since its 2022 expansion, Wiren underscores its regional drive against Serbia’s ambitious target of a 33.6% renewable share in gross final consumption by 2030. Recent reforms introducing competitive auctions (over 1,000 MW awarded in two completed auctions, and a new CfD round planned for this year), streamlined licensing, and clearer PPAs are bringing Serbia closer to EU standards and creating a more predictable investment environment, while grid constraints and coal dependence continue to pragmatically open opportunities in solar, wind, storage, and hybrid projects for early movers.

Since 2018, Greece’s RES auctions have awarded 2 GW of solar and 1.6 GW of wind under a two-way CfD scheme, while recent rules allow certain plants to suspend their CFD contracts and trade directly on the market or via PPAs, showing a flexibility that Romania could later adopt in its own scheme optimization. At the same time, Greece is fast-tracking storage, with 900 MW awarded in tenders, 4.7 GW of merchant BESS given grid priority, and new incentives for co-located solar systems. The complexity of the Greece RES and BESS roadmap could raise our focus on fine-tuning auctions, grid access, revenue models, business incentives, and fast-track licensing.

Other SEE countries are rapidly advancing in RES, BESS, and interconnection, yet Romania’s robust cross-border capacity distinguishes it, transforming today’s challenges with Ukraine and Moldova into tomorrow’s strategic opportunities.

Therefore, I believe that Romania still offers a strong platform, but to stay ahead, it needs to demonstrate regulatory and economically stable models over time and accelerate investment in grid infrastructure and cross-border interconnection capacity. Such models should offer more clarity and transparency of revenue streams, grid access, and avoiding abrupt changes.

Evaluating policies and tools from mature countries like the UK, Spain, Italy, and Greece, with a pragmatic selection for adoption, would make our model attractive over the years.

 

Wiren has positioned itself as a connector between regulation, markets, and capital. Looking ahead to the next five years, where do you see the biggest opportunity for entrepreneurial energy investors in Romania: storage, corporate PPAs, green hydrogen, or another niche still overlooked?

Through the telescope, our focus turns to next-generation infrastructure and the most impactful use cases of energy efficiency and decarbonization.

As BESS investments gradually reach scale and lose growth pace, the conversion of excess renewable electricity into hydrogen and synthetic fuels will become essential for large-scale mobility and hard-to-electrify industries, while optimizing new revenue streams for RES. Romania, thanks to its refining infrastructure and port logistics on the Black Sea, holds a strategic advantage for this emerging value chain.

At Ciurtin & Associates, I have been spending the past 15 years working on the modernization of 10+ district heating systems across the entire value chain. I have always considered thermal energy to be the most viable resource at our latitude and further north, and today I see the transition in heating shifting decisively away from gas CHP and individual boilers toward District Heating 4.0. Technology suppliers and DBOT-F investors in centralized heat pumps and geothermal (where resources allow), thermal storage for balancing, and flexible cogeneration on biomass, biogas or green hydrogen for peak demand will shape the future of district heating. Energy performance contracts may enhance the viability and liquidity of such B2G investments.

In Wiren, we also take the microscope to a few decisive elements for the coming decade: responsible maintenance, on-site energy self-sufficiency, smarter ways for households to optimize revenues and costs, and – last but most important for our vision – the electrification of isolated communities still beyond the grid.

Responsible and comprehensive maintenance is no longer just about fixing technical issues, but about anticipating them through digital monitoring and predictive analytics. By combining accountability across operators, suppliers, and contractors with strict environmental and safety standards, such an approach extends asset life, secures a reliable supply, and optimizes efficiency. In essence, maintenance done responsibly builds trust for investors, stability for operators, and resilience for communities.

Industrial self-consumption by PV installations, reinforced by batteries and potentially complemented with clustered geothermal sources, offers a resilient model for green industrial hubs producing electricity, heat, and cooling, to optimize both costs and emissions.

Residential batteries have the potential to become a cornerstone of distributed smart grids, empowering households to time-shift consumption, capture price differentials, and optimize costs – whether as prosumers storing their own solar or as consumers leveraging dynamic tariffs.

At the heart of Wiren’s DNA and sustainability statements stands the electrification of isolated communities and households – a mission we intend to advance through a publicly accessible interactive map and by rallying a broad coalition of partners, from distributors and technology providers to municipal associations, public administrators, and all stakeholders ready to help bring clean, reliable and affordable energy where it is needed most.

 

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The interview first appeared in the printed edition of Energynomics Magazine in early October 2025.

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