The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), specifically absorbing the available investment money, is the top priority of my term in office and of this ministry. According to our assessment, at this moment we are the most fortunate ministry, as we have 1.6 billion euros at our disposal under the NRRP, to which add another 15-16 billion euros from the Modernization Fund, Energy Minister Sebastian Burduja declared in an interview with AGERPRES.

“We have two milestones that haven’t yet been settled by the European Commission, the milestone related to cogeneration gas plants, and the one related to hydrogen investment. For the gas power plants we managed to sign all three contracts that practically fulfill the target pledged by Romania for the respective milestone – the investments in Constanta, Craiova and Arad, and we are still examining an investment in Ramnicu Valcea. But the target has already been met and practically the milestone has been fulfilled. We are waiting for the assessment of the Romanian Audit Authority and of the Commission to officially check this milestone as fulfilled.

For the hydrogen investment, following the recommendations of the European Commission, we had to launch that call again. We had eight financing contracts signed and we managed to end them amicably with all the eight beneficiaries, because there was a risk that they would not want this and take action against the Romanian state to recover the amounts spent with the preparation of the projects. We relaunched the call, it closes on September 4. So we are now in the submission period, followed by the assessment period, which we hope to complete in 2 – 3 weeks, given that a significant part of the projects have already been seen by the evaluators, so that by the end of September we should be able to complete the contracting as well, and that means recovering the two benchmarks in payment request No. 2.

Payment request No. 3 is next. This, again, deals with some very complicated subjects, from energy efficiency to corporate governance, as per the scope of Ordinance No. 109 applied on the most important companies under the authority of our ministry. According to our estimations, we should complete these benchmarks as well by the end of September. But this is a dynamic process and, together with our ministry’s team, we are working long days and nights, putting in effort to overcome these gaps,” said Burduja. AGERPRES (RO – author: Nicoleta Gherasi, editor: Mariana Nica; EN – editor: Simona Klodnischi)