Methodology

Time

The moment the reading was published by Transelectrica’s live feed, which refreshes about once a minute.

When the feed publishes no timestamp — which happens — the page shows the moment the data was fetched instead, marked “time of reading”. If the feed stops updating entirely, a notice appears and says for how long the values have been unchanged.

Emissions

The carbon intensity of electricity generated in Romania, in grams of CO₂-equivalent per kilowatt-hour: a weighted mean of technology-specific life-cycle emission factors from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Annex III — the same defaults used by Electricity Maps.

Hydro is taken at 10 g rather than the IPCC median of 24: that median is weighted by tropical reservoirs and by facilities in their first years, when methane from flooded vegetation peaks. Romania’s reservoirs are temperate and were impounded half a century ago. Storage is excluded — its energy already carried an intensity when first generated.

The smaller figure, “consumed (approx.)”, answers a different question: how clean is the electricity Romania actually uses. Imports are added at their own intensity — each neighbour’s previous-day generation mix, retrieved daily from the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform and weighted with the same factor table used above. Exports leave the calculation at the intensity they were generated at: energy sent abroad takes its emissions with it rather than being charged to domestic consumption.

It is an approximation, and says so: an import carries its neighbour’s own mix, not the mix of the wider grid flowing through it — the exact treatment is flow tracing across every zone at once (Tranberg et al.). Moldova and Ukraine publish no usable generation data, so their intensities are declared estimates rather than measurements; when they supply part of an import, the figure is marked with an asterisk. If the neighbour table is more than two days old, the line is withheld rather than shown stale.

Romania has no official intensity target in g/kWh; for context, the national average was around 310 in 2019, and 1.5°C-compatible pathways point to 20–40 by 2030. The colour bands:

• Low (≤100 g/kWh) — the range of Europe’s cleanest grids
• Medium (≤300 g/kWh) — around the EU average, below Romania’s recent norm
• High (>300 g/kWh) — above Romania’s 2019 average

Price

The price of electricity for the current quarter-hour in Romania’s bidding zone, as fixed by yesterday’s day-ahead auction — not a live market feed. The coupled European day-ahead market clears once a day, around 14:00 Bucharest time, setting a price for every quarter-hour of the following day; the figure shown is that auction’s result for the quarter-hour now passing, in euro per megawatt-hour.

Price days run from 01:00 to 01:00 local time, not midnight to midnight: the market settles on Central European days for every zone it couples, Romania included — the same kind of honest offset as the gas day below, which runs from 06:00 to 06:00.

A negative price is real, not an error: on sunny, windy days of low demand, producers pay to keep generating rather than shut down. When it happens, the figure shows it with its sign.

What this figure is not: the intraday price, at which trading continues until shortly before delivery, and the imbalance price, at which deviations from schedule are settled afterwards. Both differ from the day-ahead price, sometimes considerably; neither is published in this feed.

The price history carries two boundaries of its own. It begins on 27 June 2021 — the first day ENTSO-E publishes for the Romanian zone; the market itself has been coupled since 2014, but its earlier prices were never published to the platform. And on 1 October 2025 the market moved from hourly to 15-minute trading — marked on the longer charts, because the visible intraday volatility steps up there as an artefact of resolution, not a change in the market. Daily and weekly averages are directly comparable across both boundaries.

Net export / import

The balance of electricity crossing Romania’s borders. Positive export means Romania is producing more than it consumes and selling the difference to its neighbours; import means the reverse.

Romania exports most of the time, typically towards Serbia and Hungary, and imports on summer evenings when solar fades while demand is still high. The direction can flip several times a day.

In the feed’s own convention the balance is negative when exporting; the page shows the friendlier signed figure.

Demand

The power being drawn from the grid across Romania at this moment. The grid is balanced at every instant, so demand always equals generation plus net imports (or minus net exports) — the identity this card writes out.

A small drift of a megawatt or two between the sides of the equation is measurement noise, not an error.

Generation

Total power produced in Romania right now, before exports. The donut below breaks it down by source; the published buckets never quite sum to the total, so a small “Other” residual closes the account.

Storage

Power being discharged by storage installations — batteries, and Romania’s pumped unit at Lotru-Ciunget when it runs in reverse.

The feed reports discharge only: charging is counted inside consumption, so the full cycle is not visible here. Batteries discharge hardest into the evening peak — observed maxima approach 700 MW around 20:00–21:00, roughly a tenth of production in that hour.

Storage is excluded from the emissions figure: its energy already carried an intensity when it was first generated, and counting it again at zero would flatter the grid every evening.

Coal

Lignite and hard coal plants, concentrated in the Oltenia basin — Turceni, Rovinari, Işalniţa — burning locally mined lignite. At 820 gCO₂eq/kWh over its life cycle, coal is the most carbon-intensive source on the grid: around a fifth of production on a typical evening, and over half of the emissions figure above.

Romania has committed to phasing out coal, with the deadline shifting between 2026 and 2032 across successive plans. The plants increasingly run as evening and winter backup rather than baseload.

Gas

Gas-fired plants, running on Romania’s own Black Sea and onshore production — the country is the EU’s largest gas producer and imports comparatively little. Around 490 gCO₂eq/kWh over the life cycle: roughly half of coal, but far from clean.

Gas sets the pace of the evening: it ramps as solar fades, and in the market it is very often the marginal technology — the one whose costs set the electricity price.

Hydro

Romania’s largest low-carbon source across the year: the Iron Gates on the Danube (shared with Serbia), the big Carpathian reservoirs — Vidraru, Bicaz, Lotru — and hundreds of run-of-river plants. Output swings with hydrology: a wet spring can cover a third of demand, a drought summer far less.

Reservoir plants are also the grid’s traditional flexibility — they hold back water at midday and run hard into the evening peak.

Wind

Almost entirely onshore, concentrated in Dobrogea — Fântânele-Cogealac is among Europe’s largest onshore wind farms. Most of the fleet was built in one wave, 2010–2014; a second wave is under way.

At ~11 gCO₂eq/kWh life-cycle, wind is among the cleanest sources on the grid.

Solar

Utility-scale parks plus a fast-growing rooftop segment. The first wave was built 2013–2014; capacity has been growing quickly again since 2022.

Solar reshapes the whole day: around noon it can be the largest single source, and its evening fade is what gas, hydro and batteries then fill.

At night the reading goes slightly negative — the plants’ own equipment draws power while the panels produce nothing.

Nuclear

Cernavodă, Romania’s single nuclear plant: two CANDU heavy-water reactors of about 700 MW each, typically covering close to a fifth of demand between them.

A reading of zero here almost always means a unit is in planned refuelling or maintenance — CANDU outages are scheduled and last weeks. With a unit down, the intensity of the whole grid rises visibly.

Biomass

A small, steady contributor — typically around 1% — from wood-residue and agricultural-waste plants, often in cogeneration.

Its life-cycle factor of 230 gCO₂eq/kWh is far from zero: burning biomass emits CO₂ at the stack, and the accounting credit assumes regrowth that takes decades.

Other

The residual between total production as reported and the sum of the published source buckets — usually a few MW of unclassified generation. It is kept so the donut closes at exactly 100%.

Ukraine

Interconnection in the north and east, including the Mukacheve link. Ukraine’s grid synchronised with continental Europe in March 2022, in the first weeks of the invasion — an emergency synchronisation planned to take years, done in days.

Flows here shift with the state of Ukraine’s infrastructure under attack: Romania has been both a corridor for emergency imports and an exporter during Ukrainian shortfalls. Some point names on this border are inferred from the map layout rather than read from labels.

Moldova

Several links across the Prut, plus the Vulcăneşti corridor in the south. Moldova depends heavily on this border: since 2022 Romania has repeatedly been its main electricity supplier during crises, and a new 400 kV line (Vulcăneşti–Chişinău) is being built to harden the route.

Flows are usually exports from Romania — the sign here is negative most of the time. One point name here is inferred from the map layout rather than read from a label.

Bulgaria

Links across the Danube — the Kozloduy lines among them, named for Bulgaria’s nuclear plant on the far bank. Bulgaria runs a large nuclear baseload and is often a cheap exporter, so this border frequently shows imports into Romania, especially in the evening.

Serbia

Dominated by the Đerdap / Iron Gates crossings, next to the shared Danube hydro plants. Serbia is outside the EU but inside the same synchronous grid, and this border is one of Romania’s largest and most active — often the main route for Romanian exports towards the western Balkans.

Hungary

Links in the north-west, tying Romania into the Central European market region. This border is a price corridor as much as a physical one: flows follow the spread between Romanian and Central European prices, and reverse frequently.

Some point names on this border are inferred from Transelectrica’s map layout rather than read from labels.

Gas storage

Romania’s underground gas storage — the Depogaz Ploieşti sites and Depomures — as reported daily to GIE’s AGSI transparency platform. Each figure describes the previous gas day, published in the evening. The fill level is energy content as a share of working volume; injection and withdrawal are in GWh per day; the trend is in percentage points of working volume per day.

It sits on an electricity dashboard because winter adequacy runs through it: gas plants are the grid’s evening and cold-spell flexibility, domestic production is nearly flat across the year, and the seasonal swing is carried by storage — on a hard winter day, withdrawal is the country’s largest single source of gas. The stored fuel serves heating, industry and power alike, so none of it is counted in the generation mix or the emissions figure above.

The curve’s rhythm has a deadline sewn into it: EU rules require storage close to 90% full for the start of each winter, which is why the peak lands where it does every autumn.

Gas day

A gas day runs from 06:00 to 06:00, and the storage operators report to AGSI only once it has closed: figures for day D are published the following evening, at 19:30 CET. The freshest available day is therefore always yesterday or the day before, depending on when you look — that is the data’s real cadence, shown without cosmetics.

The date is the day the figures describe, not the moment they were fetched. If it ever falls more than two days behind, the feed itself has stalled; the page keeps serving the last good reading and retries quietly in the background.