Spain’s Iberdrola To Start Building 1,500 MW Wind Park in Romania Next Yr - Bloomberg

BUCHAREST (Romania), September 29 (SeeNews) – Spain’s Iberdrola will start building the first 600 megawatts (MW) of capacity for the world's largest on-shore wind park in Romania next year, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

Construction works will start sometime next year and are expected to be finalised in 2016-2017, Bloomberg quoted Adrian Goicea, manager of renewable-energy unit Iberdrola Renovables Romania, as telling reporters.

In April Iberdrola said it had been granted a licence by the Romanian power grid operator Transelectrica to connect to the grid a total of 1,500 MW of wind power. The project envisaged the construction of 50 wind farms in the region of Dobrogea, in southeastern Romania, between 2011 and 2017.

Iberdrola also plans to build a separate 80-megawatt wind-farm, starting this autumn or in the spring, and deliver it by mid-2011, Goicea said.

The average cost to buy and install wind turbines is now estimated at 1.7 million euro ($2.3 million) a megawatt, Goicea said. Using those figures, Iberdrola’s Dobrogea project would cost more than 2.5 billion euro, Bloomberg reported.

“Iberdrola established a special trading company in Romania for the future sale of the produced energy from the wind-farms. […] We are analyzing all the opportunities from internal markets, exports, bilateral agreements,” Goicea added.

Romania’s potential in wind energy is considered the highest in southeastern Europe, according to a report by Austria’s Erste Bank. Besides Iberdrola, the most important local investors in the wind energy sector are oil and gas group Petrom, power distributor Electrica, Blue Investments, EDP, ENEL, Verbund.

Iberdrola, which became the world’s biggest wind-farm owner by using government incentives and charging above-market electricity rates for clean energy, operates in 10 markets including the U.S. and the UK.

($=0.7352 euro)

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