How a battery earns in Romania

Romania runs a single bidding zone under TSO Transelectrica, with the day-ahead market cleared by OPCOM — and it is a volatile one: over the last 30 days the day-ahead spread averaged about €191/MWh, or 152% of the average price, the base that a battery captures by charging cheap and discharging into the evening peak. The grid is the real bottleneck: connection queues run to tens of gigawatts, so from 1 January 2026 Transelectrica allocates spare capacity for sites ≥5 MW by auction. On the money side the case has sharpened — ANRE ended the double taxation of storage, exempting energy stored and returned to the grid from the extraction, distribution and system-services tariffs, while a €150 million Modernisation-Fund aid scheme (EC-approved March 2026) backs at least 2,174 MWh of new capacity. With aFRR and mFRR markets already open to batteries (FCR still in prequalification), arbitrage plus balancing is what turns Romania's price swings into revenue.

€191/MWh

Day-ahead spread — 152% of the average price (30 days)

€150million

Modernisation-Fund storage aid, EC-approved Mar 2026 (≥2,174 MWh)

5GW

National storage target by end-2026 (from >1 GWh standalone today)