Rezolv secures up to €561m from 14 lenders for 1.3GW Dama Solar

Rezolv Energy said it has secured a financing package of up to €561 million, about $630 million, to carry its 1.3GW Dama Solar project in Romania directly into construction, with the European Investment Bank anchoring the facility and an InvestEU guarantee sitting behind that anchor. The group counts 14 lenders, four of them public institutions, and the credit rests on offtake, sponsor and public balance sheets rather than any labelled green bond. The "up to" qualifier is doing work here, since the announcement discloses a ceiling rather than what is drawn at signing.

On the commercial side are Erste Group Bank, UniCredit Bank, Banca Comercială Intesa Sanpaolo Romania, Société Générale, OTP Bank, Československá obchodní banka, Raiffeisen Bank S.A., Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien, Piraeus Bank and Siemens Bank, with two Raiffeisen entities among them. The development lenders are the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Finance Corporation and the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank. Rezolv says the package is the largest it has ever signed, on both the size of the facility and the number of lenders.

The asset spans more than 1,000 hectares and is expected to produce around 1,800 GWh of clean power a year. An 82-hectare nature reserve is built into the design, which Rezolv describes as one of the largest private-led nature restoration projects attached to a solar development in Southeastern Europe. Rezolv calls Dama the largest onshore renewable energy project in the EU, a superlative that is the company's own. Construction employment is put at a peak of around 1,500 people, EPC partners are still to be confirmed, and commercial operations are targeted for the second half of 2028. CEO Alastair Hammond said securing financing at that scale from 14 lenders was a major achievement and that the project would contribute to Romania's energy transition and its long-term energy security.

What the lenders were underwriting is the revenue contract. Rezolv says the financing was underpinned by two contracts for difference awarded to Dama Solar in Romania's second CfD auction, covering 520MW of the project's capacity, plus a corporate power purchase agreement with what the company calls a premium offtaker; the announcement does not name the PPA counterparty. Those state-backed CfDs reach 520MW of a 1.3GW project, which leaves the bulk of the capacity outside them, and how much of the remainder the corporate PPA absorbs is not disclosed. Whatever is left sits as merchant exposure to Romanian wholesale power prices, which is a position few syndicates of this width take on an asset whose first revenue year arrives in 2028. Rezolv's own word for the CfDs and the PPA is "underpinned," and it is the right one.

The public money is where the structure gets interesting. ESG reported on Oct. 1 that the EIB had committed $113 million to the same project, a loan that anchors an $822 million build in Arad County, where two 15-year contracts for difference cover 520MW of capacity. The fuller syndicate now disclosed runs to as much as €561 million, and the announcement does not address how the earlier tranche relates to that figure. Count the EBRD, the IFC and the BSTDB alongside the EIB and four of the fourteen institutions in the group are public lenders, the blended-finance arithmetic that our reporting keeps finding at the centre of large European renewable project debt.

On Sept. 14, sixteen commercial lenders took construction risk on the German Baltic Gennaker project only with the EIB in the syndicate and a municipal utility holding a quarter of the equity. On Sept. 30 the EIB and BNP Paribas split a $794 million guarantee portfolio for EU grid equipment under an InvestEU umbrella, each taking up to $397 million of exposure inside a $1.70 billion pan-EU package. Development banks are not waving these deals through; they are pricing risk that private capital will not carry alone, and Dama is the same trade at national scale.

The InvestEU guarantee is the thinnest part of the disclosure, described as benefiting the financing with no size, no tranche and no statement of the risk it covers, and the guarantee, rather than the anchor loan, is what changes the risk the EIB's position carries. That is worth watching when terms surface, because the amount of EU budget risk absorbed under a 14-lender syndicate is a reasonable guide to what comparable solar financings in Romania and its neighbours can expect to raise next. The other open item is execution: EPC contracts remain unsigned against a 2028 completion target, and whether Romanian demand and grid capacity absorb 1,800 GWh a year is an underwriting question the announcement leaves untouched.

Romania's CfD auction supplied a revenue floor for 520MW of a build whose remaining capacity depends on an unnamed offtaker and the merchant market, and on this evidence the country's second auction round is functioning as an on-ramp for utility-scale capital rather than a pilot. The unglamorous things to watch are the EPC confirmations Rezolv still owes and whether a syndicate this wide becomes routine for European solar or stays an exception. Commercial operations are targeted for the second half of 2028.