nextE has signed what it calls the largest corporate PPA for green energy in Romania. The contract covers a 42.9 MW solar plant and runs for 25 years. Enerdatics' own records include a bigger Romanian solar PPA signed six months earlier. Whether nextE's claim holds depends on what you choose to measure.
Key takeaways
- nextE announced on 16 January 2024 a 25-year corporate PPA in Romania supplying green energy to an undisclosed client from a 42.9 MW, 51.48 MWp photovoltaic plant.
- nextE will invest about $38 million to design and build the 51.48 MWp Romanian solar plant, which will use 78,000 photovoltaic panels and 130 inverters.
- The nextE solar plant in Romania will be built on 50 hectares under an agri-PV regime that allows grazing to continue on the site.
- nextE signed the 25-year Romanian PPA under its energy-as-a-service model, in which it owns and operates the power plant either onsite or away from the customer's point of consumption.
- Of the 10 Romanian solar PPAs Enerdatics records across 2023 and 2024, nextE's 25-year contract is the longest by a wide margin; the next longest disclosed term is 11 years.
What kind of contract has nextE signed?
It is a long-term supply contract wrapped around a power plant the customer never has to own. nextE works under an energy-as-a-service model, or EaaS. In an EaaS arrangement, the provider finances, builds, owns and operates the generating asset, and the customer simply buys the output under contract. nextE focuses this model on large consumers.
The client has not been named. Leap classifies the offtaker as industrial and records the contract as onsite, meaning the plant is designed to deliver power directly to the consumer rather than through a purely financial arrangement. The project's stated aim is to supply electricity directly to large commercial and industrial consumers in Romania.
For the customer, the attraction is predictability without capital outlay. For nextE, the 25-year term is what makes the investment work. A developer that funds a plant for a single customer needs that customer locked in for most of the asset's life.
Is it really the largest corporate PPA in Romania?
By duration, clearly. By capacity, not on Enerdatics' records.
In July 2023, six months before nextE's announcement, Enery signed a 50 MW solar PPA with Ursus Breweries, a subsidiary of Asahi Europe & International. That contract is larger than nextE's 42.9 MW. It is recorded as offsite, while nextE's is onsite. Among onsite Romanian solar contracts in Leap, nextE's is the largest, ahead of a 40 MW PPA between TESLA 50Hz and Element Industrial signed in January 2023.
Later contracts went bigger still. In May 2024, OMV Petrom signed an 84 MW solar PPA with Saint-Gobain for its Calarasi project, the largest Romanian solar PPA by capacity in Enerdatics' 2023 and 2024 records.
Term is where nextE stands apart. Of the 10 Romanian solar PPAs Enerdatics records across those two years, five disclose a duration. nextE's is 25 years. The others are 11 years, 6 years, 5.41 years and 5 years. A 25-year contract is more than twice as long as anything else disclosed in the market.
So the claim is defensible as a statement about commitment rather than size. The contract ties a corporate buyer to a single solar plant for a quarter of a century, which no other disclosed Romanian solar PPA comes close to.
What does $38 million buy?
A plant whose panel capacity is a fifth larger than its grid output. The plant is rated at 42.9 MW on the AC side, the capacity it can deliver, and 51.48 MWp on the DC side, the combined rating of its panels. The ratio between the two is 1.2.
Developers oversize the panel array deliberately. Inverters, which convert the panels' direct current into alternating current, cap the plant's output. Adding more panels than the inverters can handle at peak lets the plant run closer to full output for more hours of the day, at the cost of clipping a little power around midday.
That ratio matters when reading the investment figure. nextE's roughly $38 million works out at about $0.74 million per MWp of panel capacity, or about $0.89 million per MW of AC capacity. Both describe the same plant. Comparisons with other projects only work if they use the same basis.
The site design adds a further feature. The plant will occupy 50 hectares in an agri-PV regime. Agri-PV is a layout in which solar panels share land with farming, here by allowing grazing to continue beneath and around the arrays. It keeps the land in agricultural use while it generates power.
Enerdatics' data shows how thin pricing is in this market. Across the 10 Romanian solar PPAs Enerdatics records for 2023 and 2024, none discloses a tariff. Five disclose a term, and capacity is disclosed on eight. That leaves duration and size as the only measures on which Romanian corporate solar contracts can be compared, which is exactly why nextE's 25-year term is the headline it chose.
What does the deal signal for Romanian solar?
It signals that a share of Romania's corporate demand wants long, asset-backed contracts rather than short-dated supply deals. Most disclosed Romanian solar PPAs in Leap run for five to eleven years. A buyer willing to commit for 25 years is accepting a very different risk profile in exchange for a fixed relationship with a single plant.
It also shows the EaaS model reaching utility scale. A 42.9 MW plant serving one client is far larger than a rooftop installation, yet the commercial logic is the same: the provider carries the capital and the operating risk, and the customer carries the long commitment.
Financing for Romanian solar has since moved to much larger scales, with fourteen lenders backing a single gigawatt-scale project. Banks have also put money behind a larger solar portfolio in Romania. Corporate contracts like nextE's sit at the other end of the spectrum: one plant, one buyer, one long contract, which is about as contracted as a solar plant gets. What remains unknown is the price, and on that the Romanian record is silent.
Frequently asked questions
Who is the offtaker in nextE's Romanian solar PPA? The offtaker has not been disclosed. Leap classifies it as an industrial consumer.
How long is nextE's PPA in Romania? The contract runs for 25 years, the longest disclosed term among the Romanian solar PPAs Enerdatics records for 2023 and 2024.
How large is the nextE solar plant? It is rated at 42.9 MW of AC capacity and 51.48 MWp of panel capacity, using 78,000 panels and 130 inverters on 50 hectares.
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