Romania has strong pool of renewable energy, transport projects for EU funds, European Investment Bank official says

BUCHAREST, June 22 (Reuters) – Renewable energy and transport infrastructure led a surge of projects vying for European Union recovery funds in Romania, where the government’s capacity to tap funding has increased, a European Investment Bank (EIB) vice president said on Thursday.

Romania stands to get up to 30 billion euros ($32.87 billion) worth of grants and loans until 2026 out of the EU’s 724 billion euros Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), designed to help economies’ post-pandemic rebound.

Within central Europe, where Poland and Hungary are still struggling to unlock the funds, Romania has already received 6.3 billion euros before its reform pace stalled this year.

“We have quite an impressive and strong pipeline here in Romania, something of which we are extremely happy, because for us it is important really to have a strong pipeline of bankable projects,” EIB vice president Lilyana Pavlova told Reuters in an interview.

“And I can tell that specifically here in Romania we do have a good one.”

The EIB plans to give Romania 3 billion euros ($3.29 billion) to co-finance RRF projects until 2026. It is also managing 1.2 billion euros of the actual RRF funds slated for the private sector, either as guarantee facilities or equity instruments.

Under a separate EU modernisation fund, the EIB has already approved projects worth 2.5 billion euros for Romania, and disbursed 1.5 billion euros earlier this month for electricity grid improvement, energy efficiency and storage capacity.

Since joining the EU in 2007, Romania has struggled to tap billions of development funds, but Pavlova said “there has been quite an improvement” in the country’s project building capacity and implementation speed.

The EU funds ministry said earlier this month just under 9,000 contracts had been signed under its RRF deal, worth a cumulative 26 billion euros.

But Romania’s RRF payments have hit a road block. The ruling coalition has sent a request for a second payment in December, for a total of 2.8 billion euros.

While that request is expected to be approved in the near term, a third payment request worth 2.6 billion euros has been delayed since the first quarter, with Romania facing some of the toughest reforms to its pension system.

“So far, our impression is that Romania is on track,” Pavlova said. “We see and we understand the strong commitment of the government to continue with the reform process, more specifically addressing the milestones put in the RRF.”

($1 = 0.9128 euros)

Reporting by Luiza Ilie; Editing by David Gregorio

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