Hungary Launches First Competitive Grid Tender for Wind Power

Hungary’s energy regulator MEKH has opened the country’s first competitive tender for grid connection capacity dedicated to wind power, making 702 MVA available across nine nodes in six districts nationwide.

Applications are accepted from September 4 through October 30, with results due no later than December 13, 2026. Each bidder must request a minimum 14 MVA connection and commit to a wind installation of at least 14 MW. Grid connection windows run from September 2030 at the earliest to September 2032 at the latest.

The government intends to hold successive auctions under a broader strategy targeting four gigawatts of new wind additions to the national mix between 2026 and 2030 — an ambitious target given that wind accounted for an estimated 2 percent of Hungary’s generation in 2025.

Project scoring will reward financial contributions to host communities, preference for brownfield land, the proportion of co-located battery storage, and shared grid connection points. Battery systems are permitted as a secondary technology, provided their rated capacity does not exceed the declared wind output.

The timing is telling: South-Eastern Europe is gripped by a generation crisis driven by heat and cooling-water shortages that this summer pushed Hungary’s only nuclear plant to the brink of shutdown, sharpening the case for diversifying the country’s power supply.

Source: Balkan Green Energy News