Lack of Transparency Impedes Romanian Wind Energy Development, but Future Looks Promising

BUCHAREST, Romania, July 6, 2010 - Transparency, spatial planning and getting approval of the Environmental
Impact Assessments (EIAs) are the main barriers to the development of wind
energy in Romania, industry and government representatives were told today at
a workshop in Bucharest organised by the European Wind Energy Association
(EWEA) and the Romanian Wind Energy Association (AREE).

Despite this, projects worth 3,000 MW are due to come online in the next
three years, and Romania has relatively short lead times and costs in terms
of administrative procedures and connection to the grids.

"Although lead times and costs are better in Romania than in many other
EU countries, there are very few wind farms online, so we cannot say if the
positive trend will continue," said Dorina Iuga, EWEA's Projects Manager.

The findings come from the EU funded project Wind Barriers, which makes
recommendations for speeding up the development of wind energy in Romania.
These include improving the level of transparency in the decision making
process for grid connections, creating spatial planning procedures for areas
appropriate for wind farms in order to attract developers, and speeding up
the approval of EIAs.

"It's basically a matter of streamlining decision making processes in a
country that does not have much experience with renewable energy grid
integration and project development," concluded Iuga.

Romania had only 14 MW of wind power installed at the end of 2009. EWEA's
scenarios indicate that in 2020 the country could have up to 3,500 MW
installed.

AREE's Executive Director Dana Duica is more optimistic: "at the end of
the year we could have already 650 MW installed", she said. "Most
importantly, we recently looked at the project pipeline to discover that we
could reach 3,000 MW of wind power installed capacity in 2013. This would
mean that within three years, over 7.5% of Romanian electricity demand would
be covered by wind. I believe we would establish a new record growth in
Europe." According to Duica, Romania could have 5,000 MW of installed wind
energy capacity by 2020.

Wind energy could provide up to 17% of EU electricity demand by 2020.
This would avoid 333 million tonnes of CO2 per year, equal to 29% of the EU's
greenhouse gas reduction target. Currently the wind industry employs 192,000
people in the EU, by 2020 this number is expectede to grow to 446,000 jobs -
33 new jobs every working week from now to 2020.

The information on barriers to wind energy development are taken from the
findings of the EU-funded project, Wind Barriers: www.windbarriers.eu

For more information contact: Paolo Berrino, EWEA, paolo.berrino at ewea.org, +32-2-400-10-55