Romania Extends Emergency Power Curbs Through September as Cernavoda Restart Stays Uncertain
Bucharest has prolonged Transelectrica's industrial curtailment authority to end-September, with both Cernavoda reactors still offline and no restart timeline in sight.
Romania will keep its emergency power measures in place through the end of September, Montel reported on Friday (2026-08-28), extending the authority granted to grid operator Transelectrica to curtail electricity consumption at large industrial sites when the system needs balancing.8
The extension signals Bucharest sees no near-term fix. Romania's Cernavoda nuclear plant — its only nuclear facility, normally responsible for around 20% of national power output — went fully dark on Thursday (2026-08-13) when record-low Danube water levels forced shutdown of its last operating reactor. Each unit carries 680 MW of installed capacity, putting the total loss at more than 1,360 MW, according to Oilprice.com.4,6
Officials had tried to buy time before that final shutdown. Romania raced on Thursday (2026-08-06) to sink four barges in the Danube to redirect water flow and maintain reactor cooling, the Associated Press reported. The effort extended operations by days, not weeks.7
The emergency framework itself was approved late on Friday (2026-08-07), giving Transelectrica the power to curtail industrial load as a last resort to keep the grid in balance, Montel reported. Pushing that authority out to end-September signals authorities expect the supply gap to persist well beyond the original crisis window.2
Romania has moved to plug part of the gap with coal. The Rovinari Group 4 plant, a 300-megawatt coal-fired unit, was restarted during the week of 2026-08-17 as partial compensation for lost nuclear output, Oilprice.com reported. Three hundred megawatts against more than 1,360 MW of absent nuclear capacity is a narrow bridge; industrial curtailments carry the rest of the balancing burden.6
Pressure extends beyond Romania's borders. Record-low Danube levels also forced the shutdown of Hungary's Paks nuclear facility, which under normal conditions supplies nearly half that country's electricity, Euronews reported. Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar warned publicly of an energy crisis, and the European Commission said it was prepared to convene an emergency meeting of its Electricity Coordination Group.5
A Montel EQ analyst cautioned on Tuesday (2026-08-11) that depleted water resources could keep southeast European power systems under stress until October, even as nuclear availability nudged slightly higher overnight after heatwave-related cooling restrictions were partially eased. If that assessment proves correct, the region enters the early heating season without its normal baseload cushion.3
European gas prices reflect broader regional tightness. ICE Endex TTF front-month settled at €69.77/MWh, up 4.46% in the session recorded as of 2026-09-01, while THE M+1 climbed 5.27% to €70.97/MWh in the same session. The moves are driven by regional supply conditions generally, though sustained southeast European nuclear outages reinforce gas-to-power demand across a market already running lean.3
Romania's political backdrop adds a layer of uncertainty to any longer-term response. Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan was ousted in a no-confidence vote on Tuesday (2026-05-19), and Eusebiu-Valentin Stamate, a senior public policy analyst at Issue Monitoring, told Montel that the country's political fragility was unlikely to cause dramatic policy shifts but could delay planned energy reforms.1
The immediate constraint remains precipitation. Cernavoda cannot restart until the Danube recovers enough to restore adequate cooling-water intake, and Romania has given no date for when that might occur. Oilprice.com data put the river at a 90-year low at the time of shutdown; the Montel analyst's October ceiling for southeast European stress implies the drought is unlikely to break in September alone. If it does not, industrial users face curtailments into the start of autumn demand, and the region's power balance stays fragile well into Q4.4,3