Romania to designate unfinished hydropower projects as national security priority

The hydropower projects under construction in Romania will be designated as national security priorities under a bill to be drafted in May, with the view of completing them and putting them online as soon as possible, acting president Ilie Bolojan announced after the April 30 meeting of the national defense council CSAT.

The unfinished projects, most of them at deadlock, have completion rates between 60% and 90%. Some of them began before the fall of communism in 1989.

This means that the existing obstacles, namely "bureaucratic procedures, pending lawsuits, lack of environmental permits, use of land from the protected forest fund, and so on," according to president Bolojan, would be settled much faster under procedures to be inked in May, Digi24 reported.

This will add some 10% to the country's [6.6 GW] hydropower generation capacity, consolidating the country's self-sufficiency ratio, president Ilie Bolojan added.

Romania's installed power generation capacity is some 17 GW.

"CSAT agreed that this project be considered of national security," the president said.

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