Romania Energy Leadership Forum

On September 1, 2026, DDD Foundation Southeast Europe – Dialogue for Democracy and Development organised the first Romania Energy Leadership Forum in Bucharest, bringing together key stakeholders to address the resilience, adequacy and long-term transformation of Romania’s energy system.

Designed as a working meeting rather than a traditional conference, the Forum brought together representatives of public authorities and regulatory bodies, transmission and distribution system operators, energy producers and suppliers, major industrial consumers, financial institutions and international organisations, investors, project developers, technology companies, consultants and sector associations.

Held under the Chatham House Rule, the Forum created a space for practical dialogue around a central question: how can Romania connect decision-making, regulation, investment and implementation more effectively to build a stronger energy system?

From system resilience to flexibility

The discussions addressed four interconnected areas shaping Romania’s energy future.

Participants examined lessons from periods of energy system stress and the ability of the system to respond to hydrological, climate and operational risks. The dialogue considered the role of interconnections and imports, the need for firm capacity and the importance of incorporating more demanding stress scenarios into planning towards 2030–2035.

Flexibility emerged as another central priority. Storage, demand response, aggregation, congestion management, prosumers, energy communities and grid connection were discussed as components of an increasingly integrated system in which generation, consumption and storage need to work together.

Financing was considered alongside the conditions required to translate available capital into projects. Regulatory predictability, administrative capacity, mature projects and better alignment between investment and network development were identified as critical to accelerating implementation.

Looking further ahead, the Forum also explored emerging forces that could reshape the sector, including artificial intelligence and data centers, virtual power plants, the electrification of heavy transport, extreme climate events, new retail models and data governance.

Turning dialogue into an action agenda

One conclusion connected the different discussions: the resilience of the energy system depends not only on the strength of its individual components, but on the links between anticipation, decision-making, regulation, investment and implementation.

The Forum therefore concluded with a proposed six-month action agenda.

Priorities include exploring regulatory experiments for flexible grid connection, Vehicle-to-Grid and energy communities, establishing thematic working groups, developing proposals around regulatory predictability and data governance, examining competitiveness through energy pricing, and organising a foresight seminar focused on high-impact signals for the sector.

Progress will be monitored ahead of the next edition of the Forum.

Connecting expertise and implementation

The initiative was led by Dan Stratan, Founder and Executive President of DDD Southeast Europe Foundation and Founder and CEO of RCI Holding.

DDD Foundation acts as a neutral facilitator between public authorities, the business community and sector associations. Its role is not to replace public decision-making or private initiative, but to create a framework in which stakeholders can cooperate more effectively around shared priorities and measurable objectives.

This approach is particularly relevant to RCI Holding’s activities across the energy sector, where market expertise, engineering, project development, financing, technology and implementation increasingly need to be considered as parts of the same equation.

For Romania, the next stage will be measured not only by the quality of the dialogue, but by its ability to generate tangible progress.

The question ahead of the next Romania Energy Leadership Forum is therefore a practical one: what changed because this dialogue took place?