How home of big oil blazed a trail for renewables

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset.

- By AJIT NIRANJAN PLOIEȘTI

But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the northwest, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sunlit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops nationwide.

"The trend is irreversible," said Liviu Gavrilă, vice-president of the Romanian Wind Energy Association and manager at Enery, which is building the solar farm. "But we need to play it smart."