Turning Energy Investments from Operational Costs to Strategic Assets

Marius Ciobanu, Founder & CEO of Ciobanu & Associates Consulting House, discusses consulting that delivers megawatts, not presentations, how energy investments are transformed from an operational cost into a strategic asset, and Romania’s potential to become one of the most important energy hubs in Central Europe.

Marius Ciobanu started out in court—two years in the legal field that shaped his structure, discipline, and taste for detail. He later gave up his lawyer’s robe for a livelier direction: working with people. He chose medicine out of a passion for helping people. He served as the director of two regional hospitals, where he learned the meaning of discipline, exact science, and a genuine dedication to people. Yet his mind was drawn to sales, interaction, and process optimization. In 2002, he founded his first company, a sales training firm, starting with a room, a flipchart, and a dream—to teach people to communicate value and sell with meaning. It was the beginning of a journey spanning more than two decades, during which Marius built, step by step, his career as a trainer, strategist, and leader.

Marius has always been fascinated by sales—not as a transaction, but as a psychological and economic mechanism for progress. From that experience he learned that no business could grow without a motivated team, a clear process and a coherent strategy. This is how Casa de Consultanta ‘Ciobanu si Asociatii’ (Ciobanu & Associates Consulting House) was born, a project that started as a small team of trainers and consultants and turned into a network of multidisciplinary professionals, capable of delivering integrated consulting, management, and implementation solutions.

Ciobanu & Associates Consulting House represents over 800 consulting projects in the fields of management, energy and law, eight regional consulting centres in Romania, and over 140 employees and strategic partners. With a turnover of over €327 million in total cumulative managed portfolio and EPC projects of over 80 MW installed and more than 50 MW of storage, Ciobanu & Associates Consulting House (CCCA) offers advanced energy strategy and engineering solutions, integrated expertise in optimizing and transforming energy systems, advanced energy intelligence and operational efficiency services, project management, and legal consulting.

ENERGY – THE NEW INNOVATION GROUND

Dear Mr. Ciobanu, after more than a decade in business and management consulting, you have discovered energy. How do you go from law and training to one of the biggest energy consultancies?

Marius Ciobanu: My shift to energy was not a change, but a professional maturing process. I started out in the legal profession, where I acquired the discipline, rigor, and mental structure that are indispensable in energy projects today. I have learned in court that every detail counts, that the argumentation must be impeccable and the documentation – flawless. I apply that culture of precision today in the technical, legal and financial analysis of multi-million-euro energy projects.

After the legal profession, I chose people. Training was my leadership school—over 30 years of working with thousands of professionals, forming teams, building processes, understanding the psychology of performance, and the mechanisms of motivation. There, I learned that any project, regardless of its complexity, is carried out by people, not Excel spreadsheets.

The second stage – healthcare management – introduced me to the world of life-impacting decisions. In hospitals, there is no such thing as “it’s just business as usual”. There, I learned to coordinate complex systems, implement quality procedures, manage major risks, lead entire organizations toward performance, and transform ideas into real infrastructure. I developed hospitals, introduced private health concepts nationwide, created the first health cards and medical subscription systems, growing businesses from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of euros.

When I discovered energy, everything I had learned in 20+ years fell into one place: legal, management, psychology, discipline, strategy and technology. Energy is where I can be 100% me: a man of vision, but also of details. A technical specialist, but also a business strategist. A team leader, but also a systems architect.

Except that in energy I didn’t come to comment on the market – I came to change it. Today, CCCA is the result of that journey: a consultancy built on legal rigor, managerial experience, technical knowledge and a clear philosophy – we don’t present, we implement. We don’t theorize; we deliver megawatts.

What does consultancy that no longer delivers presentations, but megawatts look like?

Marius Ciobanu: Traditional consultancy delivers slides. We deliver energy systems that work. This is the fundamental difference.

We often speak with investors interested in Romania who want to invest but don’t know where to start. Currently, a foreign investor entering Romania requires multiple specialists: a lawyer to guide them through the national legal framework, a technical expert familiar with the electricity grid, an environmental consultant, a procurement and tendering specialist, an EPC contractor for system installation, a specialist to monitor equipment and energy flows, and a professional to manage relationships with distributors, operators, and authorities (ANRE, OPCOM), etc.

As we can see, this is a long list of specialists who are hard to find, and coordinating them requires significant time, resources, and careful attention at different stages.

Ciobanu & Associates Consulting House solves this problem by bringing all these specialists together in one place. Essentially, the investor communicates their needs once, and their challenges are understood and addressed in a fully integrated manner, without the need to interact with multiple service providers.

Until now, this concept did not exist in Romania. It has been a long and challenging journey, but since 2023, we have been the only Consulting House offering this type of integrated, nationwide consultancy.

CCCA consultancy is built as an end-to-end, integrated, complete process in which we take ownership of the entire investment. We start with the in-depth technical analysis: PVsyst, hourly curve simulations, production estimates, battery modelling (BESS), optimal sizing for self-consumption and injection, plus grid compatibility analyses.

Moving on to the financial side: CAPEX at granular level, forecasted OPEX, cash-flow analysis, multiple market scenarios, LCOE, ROI and NPV calculation. We place the project within the current legislative context, with all pricing scenarios and support policies.

Then we move on to legal advice – this is where my experience as a lawyer comes into its own. Each contract is carefully checked, each procedure complies with ANRE criteria, distributor, producer and all legal requirements.

We manage procurement, evaluate integrators, provide full project management, verify implementation, test, validate and monitor.

In the end, the customer does not receive a presentation with recommendations, but a functioning, optimized, monitored, energy and money producing PV power plant with a trained team and a risk management system in place.

This is consultancy that sells not ideas, but infrastructure.

This is consultancy that doesn’t show you the future but puts it into action.

This is the CCCA consultancy.

How has CCCA changed the way Romanian companies look at energy investments – from operational cost to strategic asset?

Marius Ciobanu: CCCA has introduced a completely different way of looking at energy investments in Romania: energy as a strategic tool, not a necessary bill.

Romanian companies came to us with the classic question: “How do we cut costs?”. Today, after discussions and projects implemented together, I came up with the question: “How do we turn energy into a competitive advantage for 10-15 years?”.

What we changed, specifically:

1. We moved the energy from P&L to the balance sheet

A PV + storage system is no longer perceived as a cost, but as a depreciable, scalable, predictable asset that stabilizes EBITDA and reduces exposure to market volatility.

2. We introduced the culture of ‘smart producer’

Companies no longer consume passively. They produce, store, optimize, manage their load, control their costs and become energy independent.

3. We have integrated energy into our business strategy

For each project we define:

• Long-term scenarios
• Risk analyses
• Operational synergies
• Tax and financial benefits
• Market strategies
• Access to funds (CEF, AFM, NRRP, PPA, Leasing)

The result? The companies we work with have savings of millions of euros, high predictability, energy independence and a direct advantage in European competition.

Energy is no longer a problem. It is an instrument of economic power.

A ROMANIAN CONSULTING FIRM ON THE EUROPEAN MAP

How can you build from Arad a consultancy network working for industrial clients and international companies? Can a Romanian company beat global brands?

Marius Ciobanu: My answer is simple: YES.

And it’s not just possible – CCCA already does it.

Our success is not about geography, but about mentality. We built CCCA on a Western performance culture: speed, precision, integrity and execution.

While big international companies come with cumbersome procedures, huge teams and slow reaction time, we come with flexibility, adaptability and a hands-on approach.

At CCCA:

• We reply faster.
• We collaborate in working committees, bringing all specialists together at the same table.
• We bring the client to the table, consider their needs, and guide them in selecting the best possible solution.
• We develop work scenarios, always presenting a pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic option on the table, each accompanied by calculations, assessments, analyses, and outcome simulations.
• We work in a personalized way, not according to a template.
• We decide in hours, not weeks.
• We take responsibility for execution, not just opinion.
• We are directly involved in every critical project

And yes, a huge advantage is that the client has direct access to the CEO – a level of accountability and involvement that the big brands can’t offer.

Romania can beat global brands when it delivers performance, not presentations. When delivering megawatts, not PowerPoint. When delivering real, not promising. This is what we do.

It seems impossible to tie medicine to photovoltaics – but the principles are the same: precision, safety, predictability. How has your experience in hospital management prepared you for energy consulting?

Marius Ciobanu: Medicine shaped me in the toughest way possible. In a hospital, a detail can save a life or put it at risk. This responsibility changes you forever.

In energy we brought three major lessons from health management:

1. Absolute precision

In hospitals there is no “almost right”. The same in energy, a few percent error in PVsyst, BESS sizing or LCOE estimation can create huge losses. That’s why we work with strict procedures and multiple checks.

2. Procedures, standards and predictability

Hospitals operate on protocols. Today, CCCA is one of the few consultancies with internal procedures that resemble healthcare quality protocols. Repeatable quality = profitable projects.

3. Empathy and leadership in critical situations

In healthcare I have learned to manage teams, pressure, crises and borderline situations. In energy, when a multi-million-euro project stalls or needs to be fast-tracked, those skills make all the difference.

Medicine has taught me to look at each energy project as a living organism: with interdependencies, risks, systems and processes. This mindset differentiates us profoundly in the marketplace.

ROMANIA – FUTURE ENERGY HUB OR JUST A CONSUMER MARKET?

Can Romania become a Central European energy hub? What is missing today – infrastructure, mentality or investment courage?

Marius Ciobanu: Romania has real potential to become a regional energy hub. We have resources, we have a more solid infrastructure than many countries in the region and we have access to substantial funding.

What is missing?

1. Infrastructure

We cannot export energy or massively integrate storage without grid modernization. We need new stations, new lines, real digitization.

2. Mentality

We need to move from reactive to proactive. From “let’s see if it works” to “let’s make it work”.

3. Speed of decision-making

Regulations exist; funding exists. Their application is slow. If we speed up the pace, Romania can be among the top three energy hubs in the region.

I deeply believe that Romania is not just a consumer market. It is a market of production, storage, export and innovation. CCCA is already leading the way in driving this transformation.

FUTURE PLANS

What are the future plans of Ciobanu & Associates Consulting Firm? What’s next? Internationalization, development of own digital consultancy platform, expansion of training services for the European energy market?

Marius Ciobanu: Our plans for 2026 are clear and ambitious.

1. Internationalization of CCCA

We are expanding in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Romania can export quality energy know-how. We want CCCA to be the first internationally recognized Romanian name in energy consulting.

2. Creating Romania’s first CCCA Energy Intelligence digital platform

An advanced platform that will integrate:

• PV + BESS Simulations
• Financial models
• Risk analyses
• LCOE calculation
• Grid studies
• Dynamic scenarios

It will be the first Romanian end-to-end digitized energy consultancy tool in Romania.

3. European Energy Training Academy

Who we want to reach:

• Engineers
• Managers
• Investors
• Energy consultants

Based on real projects. Not theoretical courses but applied training.

In essence: we want to build a complete ecosystem – strategy, technology, people, digitization.

In the current global context, characterized by economic uncertainty, the tactical decisions that management must make to ensure the smooth running of a consulting company are essential. How do you build a consultancy that thinks like an algorithm but acts like a human?

Marius Ciobanu: Balancing accuracy and empathy.

Algorithms give us precision:

• PVsyst
• Multi-scenario simulations
• LCOE
• Financial models
• Time optimizations
• Big data analytics

People give the direction:

• Negotiation
• Leadership
• Understanding risk
• adaptation
• Strategic communication

At CCCA, the algorithm calculates, but the human decides. The algorithm optimizes, but the human sees the opportunity. The algorithm predicts, but the human convinces the investor to take the plunge.

CCCA is built on this synergy: digital precision + human leadership.

Algorithms can do the math, but only humans can convince investors. Is the future of energy in the hands of consultants who understand both numbers and people?

Marius Ciobanu: Absolutely. Energy has become too complex for one-dimensional specialists. The future belongs to consultants who understand:

Technical

• PV, BESS, grid, short circuit, load curves, SCADA
• Optimal sizing
• Grid impact
• Energy modelling

Financial

• CAPEX, OPEX, LCOE
• Cash-flow
• Market
• Taxes, depreciation
• European funding

Human

• People
• Teams
• Investors
• Partnerships
• Negotiation

Energy is math and psychology. Tech and business. Strategy and execution.

Those who can combine all these dimensions will have no competition in the next 10 years. That is where CCCA positions itself.

Romania is going through a period of accelerating investment in renewable energy sources. New regulations are coming – what has been solved and what should be improved?

Marius Ciobanu: What has been solved:

• We have a long-term national strategy (2025-2035).
• ANRE has clarified connection procedures and the status of prosumers.
• There is consistent funding: AFM, NRRP, Modernization Fund, CEF, PPA, Leasing.
• Regulations for aggregators and flexibility have emerged – absolutely necessary.
• Romania is starting to understand that storage is not optional.

What needs improvement:

1. Speed of procedures

Decisions need to be implemented much faster. Investors lose months in red tape.

2. Full digitization

ANRE, distributors, local institutions – all need to be fully digitized.

3. Unified interpretation of the law

Today the same regulation is applied differently depending on the county, distributor or inspector.

4. Long-term predictability

Investments of tens of millions are not made with rules changed quarterly. Large investors want stability, not regulatory volatility.

Romania has enormous potential, but it needs to speed up, digitize and standardize the interpretation of the law. If we take these steps, we can become one of the most important energy centres of Central Europe.