Solar project developer and asset owner Photon Energy Group has completed two solar PV projects in Romania with a combined capacity of 9.5MWp.
Located near Aiud and Teiuș in Romania’s Alba county, the power plants are equipped with about 8,700 solar modules each. With bifacial solar modules mounted on single-axis trackers, the plants will deliver a combined capacity of 13.9GWh annually to the grid managed by Distribuție Energie Electrică Romania.
Photon Energy will sell the energy generated by the plants on a merchant basis, without any support or power purchase agreement with an energy off-taker. Moreover, it expects the plants to generate a combined €2 million (US$2.19 million) in revenue based on the current forward prices for electricity base load in Romania in the next 12 months.
“Following the energisation of our first four plants in Romania, the commissioning of the power plants in Aiud and Teiuș represents another important milestone for Photon Energy in the Romanian renewable energy market, where we plan to commission an additional capacity of around 10MWp, expanding our independent power producer (IPP) portfolio to over 120MWp in the coming weeks,” said Georg Hotar, CEO of Photon Energy Group.
Apart from these projects in Romania, the Photon Energy Group is developing utility-scale solar PV projects with a combined capacity of over 950MWp in Australia and its key central and eastern Europe markets, including over 240MWp in Romania. The remaining Romanian projects in the development pipeline are expected to be built and commissioned in 2023 and 2024.
In March, Photon Energy Group closed a €21.9 million non-recourse project refinancing agreement for eight power plants in Romania with a total installed capacity of 31.5MWp. The five-year agreement, closed with Raiffeisen Bank International in Austria, was the company’s first project financing of European PV assets that operated on a merchant basis, selling energy to a market without a power purchase agreement (PPA) or state support.