The Romanian Ministry of Energy said this week that state-owned energy company Societatea de Administrare Participațiilor în Energie S.A. (SAPE SA) is currently conducting a feasibility study to resume the development of the Tarniţa Lăpuşteşti pumped hydropower project on the Someșul Cald River in Cluj County, northern Romania.

The government said the storage project will be the country's first pumped hydropower station, with its capacity ranging between 500 MW and 1,000 MW. It will use water from Lake Tarniţa and Lake Lăpusteşti. The system will feature turbines with capacities of 250 MW each.

Development originally began in 1989, but the project has since gone through a series of setbacks. Hidro Tarnita, the Romanian project company in charge of managing the planned asset, has held a number of failed tenders for the project over the past decade. Finally, the Romanian authorities abandoned the project in 2019 after defining it as financially unviable.