Cool Stories About Clean Energy in Eastern Europe — Yes, Eastern Europe!

Editorial note: It is pollen season in D.C., and I was felled last week by a wicked and exceedingly stubborn sinus infection. Apologies. I hope to catch up with an extra E/lectrify post later this week.

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Well, this all started a couple weeks ago, when I was looking at Ember Energy’s excellent 2026 Global Electricity Review and was stopped cold by the report’s analysis of how much of various countries’ summer midday power might be coming from solar.

The summer midday peak is a marker for a country’s maximum solar potential — how much solar could be produced under optimal conditions, like summer’s long, sunny days. Hungary topped the list. On average, the country was getting 41% of its daily power from solar, but in the summer, its midday peak hit 91%, the report said. 

Wait, Hungary?

Then on May 7, I was at an AI conference in Washington, D.C., where I heard ambassadors from Lithuania, Moldova and Romania all talk about how much renewable energy their countries have put online in the past five or six years. 

Renewables were up almost 13-fold in Moldova, a landlocked country slightly larger than the state of Maryland, wedged in between Ukraine and Romania. “Renewables increased from 0% to approximately 25% of energy consumption,” said Vladislav Kulminski, the country’s ambassador to the United States.

Moldova recently passed the 1 GW mark for total wind and solar online, and for a brief period on Aug. 23, 2025, 100% of the country’s power was provided by local renewables. It is aiming for 30% renewable power by 2030.

Romania is one of Europe’s major natural gas producers, but recent figures show that more than 45% of its electricity comes from hydropower, with solar growing, and nuclear and natural gas edging down. 

“We’re currently building in the western part of the country the largest solar farm in Europe,” the 1.3 GW Dama solar project, Ambassador Andrei Muraru said.

It is always humbling and a bit unsettling to realize how little one knows about the clean energy transitions going on in other parts of the world, and in the case of Eastern Europe, my ignorance felt increasingly inexcusable.

Why should we be paying attention to these countries? What might we learn from them? First, they have very immediate and pragmatic views on energy independence. Many were completely dependent on the former Soviet Union for their energy, primarily from natural gas. 

Following the dissolution of the USSR, getting out from under Russia’s influence meant disconnecting from the Russian grid and Russia’s oil and gas supplies — an imperative the war in Ukraine made all the more urgent.

“We were already talking about energy security … decades ago when we realized that in our region, energy can be used for political purposes,” said Lithuanian Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis. “If we want to be independent, we have first to be able to ensure energy security.”

Translation: Clean energy at home means they aren’t spending money on imported fossil fuels and are less exposed to the supply and price disruptions caused by ongoing, stalemated wars.

Clearly, there was a very cool story here, or rather, multiple cool stories. I started researching renewable energy in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova and Romania. What are they doing? How are they doing it? 

My first step was finding an online map showing how much sunshine — insolation in industry-speak — Eastern Europe gets. Looking at a few different maps, I was surprised to see the region tends to lie in yellow and light green zones — not the sun-drenched reds of Africa or the American Southwest, but still not the deeper, cloudy greens and blues of Europe’s northern countries (see below). 

So, the region gets enough sun to make solar a viable source of energy. 

And with that sun, the transition to renewables and other clean technologies is being driven by a combination of factors — high electricity bills, consistent government policies and incentives and, yes, to a certain extent, cheap Chinese solar panels.

Romania was one of 50 countries that set all-time records for imports of Chinese panels in March, according to Ember. 

An April 13 article in the Balkan Green Energy News details how local governments in Hungary are bulking up on solar to help cut their energy bills. A district government in Budapest is “conducting a large-scale green energy program. It aims to place solar panels on all state-owned pre-university education entities,” BGEN reports. 

Rooftop solar will also go on 100 multifamily apartment houses, with the electricity used to power the buildings’ communal areas.

Balcony, rooftop and community solar have also been drivers for the growth of clean energy across Eastern Europe. Romania has gone big on expanding its number of “prosumers” — homes, small businesses and schools with rooftop solar — with incentives funded by the European Union.

A Feb. 26 article in BGEN reported the country’s 290,000 prosumers accounted for almost half of its 7 GW of solar capacity.

In Lithuania, plug-in balcony systems are limited to 800 watts and are relatively cheap — about €500 ($581) — with government subsidies covering 40% of the cost, according to the European Climate Initiative. 

No permits are required, but apartment dwellers must get approval from other tenants in their buildings and inform their grid operator after their system goes online. It is still a niche segment of the country’s solar market, but definitely growing (see picture at top of story).

Reading one article after another, it was difficult not to compare these countries with the United States. Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova and Romania are relatively small countries and not particularly rich, but they have made clean energy a political and economic priority, integral to national growth, security and independence. 

With the wars in Ukraine and Iran front of mind, what they are doing is relatively simple and effective — creating policies that provide support and remove barriers for clean energy adoption.

By comparison, the U.S. energy system is — pun somewhat intended — balkanized across 3,000 utilities, 51 public utility commissions and federal, state and local governments that can tie up clean energy projects in months, if not years of red tape, as electric bills continue to rise.

Under President Donald Trump’s scorched-earth war on renewables, clean energy policy has devolved to an uneven, state-by-state proposition. Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Utah and Virginia only recently became the first states to legalize balcony solar. California has installed enough battery storage to soak up and shift its oversupply of midday solar to evening hours.

Data centers and their unprecedented power demand have further polarized discussions about energy policy. Trump, the Republicans and many in the electric power industry continue to insist that new natural gas plants must be built to provide the needed electrons, discounting that a more flexible grid is the way forward, and renewables and storage are the quickest, cheapest way to get there.

Political and economic differences aside, electricity systems in the U.S. and Eastern Europe do have one thing in common — the amount of new power they can put online is limited by their lack of new transmission. As a result, they are both looking at various grid-enhancing technologies — GETs — which can increase the amount of power existing lines can carry (as ace energy reporter Amena Saiyid wrote about for E/lectrify here.)

I have to wade into some jargon here because I am going to talk about one of those GETs — dynamic line ratings — and how Gridraven, an Estonian startup, is using artificial intelligence to make DLR more effective and infinitely cooler.

What DLR does is monitor the grid with sensors that track the temperature of specific lines. If a line is hot — for example, on a very sunny, warm day — it might carry less power. A line that is cooled by wind or rain may be able to carry more. This flexibility can be used to optimize the amount of power on the grid at any one time. 

Acceptance of DLR in the U.S. has been slow because of the time and expense of installing sensors on enough lines and because the technology’s accuracy and effectiveness can vary. 

At least that’s what Georg Rute, CEO of Gridraven, told me when I met him at the AI conference. Back in 2018, Estonia’s transmission operator began experimenting to see if DLR based primarily on weather forecasts could be effective, Rute said. 

Estonia was interested in DLR because, like other Eastern European countries, it had begun aggressively transitioning away from fossil fuels. In 2024, the country produced about 63% of its power from renewables, according to the Europe Environment Agency.

But Rute recalled, weather-based DLR initially didn’t work “because weather forecasts often get it wrong.

“Then fast forward to 2023 and … we came back to this dynamic line rating opportunity with the assumption that we can fix that with machine learning,” he said. “Even if weather forecasts get it wrong, we can learn how they get it wrong and fix that.”

What forecasts miss, he said, is “the effect of landscape and terrain [and] trees.” Even a small amount of wind, channeled through or under trees, can affect a line’s temperature and how much power it can carry, he said.

Gridraven built its system using weather forecasts from over 300,000 weather stations and geophysical maps that provide detailed information on every tree and hill, Rute said.

“We put all of that into machine learning, and we’re able to learn how the weather forecast gets it wrong because of the landscape in a specific location. And that trained model then is generally translatable to other locations without weather stations.”

In other words, DLR without sensors, a leap in the technology that is beyond cool and a potential game changer. 

Gridraven’s system can provide “ultra precise weather models” for anywhere in the U.S. and most of Europe, producing dynamic line ratings that can increase the amount of power a line can carry by 30%, Rute said. The system has already been used successfully in Estonia and Finland, and Rute has relocated to Austin, Texas to crack the U.S. market. 

Pilot projects are in the works, possibly beginning this summer, though details have not been released yet.  

One strong selling point: Gridraven’s system keeps learning. 

“Using machine learning doesn’t just generate a line rating number,” Rute wrote in a May 9, 2025 op-ed for Latitude Media. “It provides a range and a confidence level based on the underlying data quality, historical model performance, and forecast volatility. Accuracy continues to improve as machine learning models constantly learn with new data.”

Rute relocated to Austin because he knew if he was going to get U.S. utilities and grid operators to adopt Gridraven’s technology, he was going to have to be on the ground to talk them through their traditional distrust of anything European.

It doesn’t matter how successfully the company’s system is working in Estonia and Finland. The U.S. is different; we have all those risk-avoiding utilities, grid operators and commissions. Plus, we don’t like admitting that any country can develop technology that is better than ours, which is at least one of the reasons why — unlike the rest of the world — we can’t buy Chinese EVs.

As Trump continues to isolate the U.S. from global markets and communities, it is imperative that we know as much as possible about clean energy transitions in other countries. We need more cool stories about the technologies, policies and innovations — the progress and the obstacles — so we can listen to and learn from each other. 

Within the U.S., the same may be said about the transition stories in other communities and states. 

In his incisive study of China, “Breakneck,” Dan Wang talks about the critical role of “process knowledge” — what is learned by doing — and the creation of “communities of practice” in the country’s dominance in global cleantech. 

Imagine what might happen if we were building and sharing clean energy process knowledge and creating communities of practice on a global scale. Then, think about who benefits from our isolation and ignorance.

E/lectrify will keep reporting on cool clean energy stories from around the world. Where do you think I should start looking next?