"Big step to make Romania green"

A landmark power purchase agreement (PPA) signed by Axpo last summer for Europe’s largest operational onshore wind farm has won a prestigious industry award from the leading Romanian energy trade magazine, Energynomics.ro.  

Presenting the prize for ‘best newcomer/best turnaround of the year’, Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Avacaritei praised the first virtual PPA concluded on the Romanian market as “a truly pioneering project for the local energy market. The award is well deserved.”

Axpo’s innovative seven-year deal with CEZ’s Fântânele-Cogealac-Gradina onshore wind farm, the company’s largest PPA in the region to date, covers more than 4 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity production. Under the PPA, Axpo hedges approximately 50 per cent of CEZ’s combined installed capacity of 600 megawatts (MW) from the three wind farms owned and managed by a Macquarie Asset Management long-term infrastructure fund. The plants are located in Dobrogea, close to the Black Sea in Romania.

Accepting the award, Axpo Energy Romania Managing Director Radu Rat said: “This represents the culmination of the work for an entire team working together across divisions and geographies towards a common goal. It shows the hours spent in meetings trying to find the best solutions, the complex mathematics behind ensuring that seven years of power are correctly priced, the inventiveness of people who dared to imagine the impossible, and the client who understood that this is the best solution. In the name of all these people, I thank you for this award. This project is a big step in the process to make Romania green, and we are ready to make our contribution on similar projects.”

The ninth edition of the Energynomics Awards for excellence in energy was held at the Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Bucharest. More than 120 representatives of the Romanian energy community celebrated the  achievements of industry companies, projects and personalities in the presence of George Niculescu, Secretary of State in Romania’s Ministry of Energy; Carolina Hidea, Economic Counsel at the Embassy of the United States of America in Romania; Zoltan Nagy-Bege, Vice President of Romania’s energy regulator ANRE; and Cristian Nacu, Senior Country Officer Romania and Moldova for the IFC World Bank.

Axpo continues to expand its activities in the Romanian energy market, with a local team of eight employees working closely with Axpo’s specialists from its Swiss headquarters and other countries to implement similar deals in 2022 and beyond.