Good practice:

RO-Energy Programme – Electrification of households

Romanian government authorities developed a program to increase energy supply security in all sectors, funded and implemented in cooperation with Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway governments, through EEA Grants. The RO-Energy program promotes bilateral projects in several areas of interest: increasing renewable energy production capacity, research and development in the energy sector, electrification of households, increasing energy efficiency and reducing emissions in all fields. With focus on electrification, this scheme provides support for projects that will electrify households and communities where connection to the grid is not technically or economically feasible. The applications that support the economic activity - agricultural or tourist, within the targeted groups of households will have priority for financing. Through this program, each individual project can be financed with 200,000 to 2 Mil Euro with a grant rate of 90% for NGOs and 85% for public authorities. Eligible costs for this program include: salaries for the staff involved, travel expenses, costs for new or second-hand equipment and acquisition of land or buildings.
The program is addressed to any entity, public or private, commercial or non-commercial and NGOs, established as legal person in Romania, which are targeting off‐grid solutions in areas with technical constraints that excludes grid connection.

For the sector of electrification, the total budget allocated was 10 mil Euro, with a maximum grant rate of 85%, without exceeding 4 mil Euro per application and the remaining costs - provided by the Project Promoter. The funds are allocated by the donor states, mentioned above.

Until June 2019, 2 projects with a total value of 841.000 Euro were funded under this thematic area, out of which € 712.400 represents the requested grants.

This good practice can be successfully implemented in other European Union regions where the same difficulties are encountered – grid connection of isolated households is not feasible. Moreover, projects for the electrification of groups of households carrying out agricultural economic activities are encouraged. In this way they will be able to develop theirs activities in the sector. Also, it will improve theirs life quality by reducing pollution caused by agricultural activities.