Energy Minister Burduja: “I believe the Tarniţa-Lăpusteşti project should be declared of national importance”

“I believe that the Tarniţa-Lăpusteşti project should be declared of national importance, but until a feasibility study is done we have nothing, just an idea or old studies,” said Energy Minister Sebastian Burduja in a press conference on Tuesday.

“At Tarnita, you know that we signed the memorandum with Itochu and we want to continue this partnership. At Tarnita, the problem is not, as SAPE (Energy Shareholding Management Company) declared, that it is not declared of national importance and therefore a feasibility study cannot be done. On the contrary, the logic is to do a feasibility study, to bring it up to date, after which you can, possibly, declare it of national importance. I think it should be declared, but until you have the feasibility study, you have nothing, you only have an idea or studies that are 10, 12, 15 years old. It is a regret that I have that we did not manage to assign this feasibility study, even though it was budgeted at over three million euros. I am not giving up on this project and I do not think that Romania should give up, regardless of what happens with the Ministry of Energy”, said Burduja, Financial Intelligence reads.

The evaluation committee within the Energy Participation Management Company (SAPE) rejected in October both offers submitted for the “Feasibility Study and Technical-Economic Documentation for the Tarniţa – Lăpuşteşti Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Power Plant (CHEAP) investment objective”.

SAPE launched the first tender procedure for the feasibility study of the Tarniţa hydroelectric power plant in October 2023, for which 16 bidders initially expressed interest. The tender was automatically cancelled at the end of last year by SICAP because, according to an announcement posted on the platform, “at the deadline for submitting bids, none of the registered bidders encrypted the financial offer/or did not respond to all the electronic evaluation factors, as the case may be.”

The tender was resumed in mid-January 2024. After several requests for postponement from potential bidders, in mid-June, at the deadline, two offers were submitted for the feasibility study. The evaluation committee analyzed the submitted offers and, following the evaluations, both were rejected, as they did not comply with the requirements of the tender specifications, given that, upon resuming the tender, it was modified and adapted to be more accessible and flexible, a SAPE press release stated.

At the beginning of November, the Ministry of Energy and the Japanese company Itochu Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the development of the Tarniţa-Lăpuşteşti pumped storage hydropower plant, with Minister Sebastian Burduja declaring at the time that Itochu will participate in the review of the technical documentation and in the following stages: feasibility study, technical design and project execution, stages that will go through all the legal rigors from a competitiveness perspective.