400 million lei for prosumers' batteries. Only one in three has storage

Ministerul Mediului, the environment ministry, has put out for public consultation a scheme under which the state funds prosumers' batteries, with a budget of 400 million lei, administered through Administrația Fondului pentru Mediu, the environment fund. The emphasis shifts from fitting new panels to keeping the energy the existing ones produce.

What the state pays. At most 15,000 lei including VAT per beneficiary and at most 75% of the eligible costs — the rest, at least a quarter, is the prosumer's. The funding is capped at 1,250 lei for each kWh of capacity. In the form under consultation, the battery must be new, of at least 12 kWh, with a warranty of at least five years and a minimum of 3,000 charge-discharge cycles.

The scheme is for individuals who are already prosumers, whether they fitted their panels through Casa Verde Fotovoltaice or paid for them themselves.

How many already have batteries. The position published by ANRE, the energy regulator, on 30 June 2026 counts 127,084 prosumers with storage, out of 359,378 in total. That is 35%, a little more than one in three. The remaining almost 232,000 are exactly the scheme's target. The figures, county by county, are on the prosumers page.

What 400 million amounts to. At the cap of 1,250 lei per kWh, the budget covers 320 MWh of subsidised capacity. The ministry estimates at least 400 MWh, which assumes that people will fit batteries larger than the minimum and pay the difference themselves: the cap of 15,000 lei is reached exactly at 12 kWh, so every kWh above that comes out of their own pocket.

For scale: in May, prosumers sold 313 GWh into the grid, some 10 GWh a day. So 400 MWh is about 4% of a day's deliveries. It does not change the system, but it moves part of the midday peak into the evening, where it is actually needed.

Why the hour matters, not just the quantity. At midday, hundreds of thousands of installations generate at the same time and push the surplus into the grid. In the evening solar output falls, demand rises, and the difference is covered from gas plants, hydro or imports. A home battery produces nothing extra — it moves energy from the hour when it is cheap and plentiful to the hour when it is expensive and short. For the prosumer that means more self-consumption and less electricity bought in the evening.

What comes next for the new ones. Separately from the scheme, prime minister Ilie Bolojan has proposed that new prosumers be allowed to connect to the grid only if they also have storage capacity. The measure is not announced as an obligation for those already connected; for them, the direction remains voluntary funding.

The text is under public consultation and may change before it is published in Monitorul Oficial, the official gazette. The ministry's announcement is here.