BIG MEGA Renewable Energy, a joint venture between publicly listed Israeli real-estate companies BIG Shopping Centers Ltd. and MEGA OR Holdings, has built a growing presence in Romania’s wind energy sector through two major project financings over the past two years.

In 2024, BIG MEGA secured financing for its 102-megawatt Urleasca wind farm in Braila County. That project was later constructed by Portuguese EPC contractor CJR Renewables and marked the company’s first large-scale Romanian wind development.

Related: all the functioning wind farms in the Middle East

In late 2025, with public reporting in January 2026, BIG MEGA announced a second major financing: a €100 million syndicated loan to support the construction of a 102-MW wind farm in Vacareni, Tulcea County. The financing was arranged with a syndicate of European lenders including Erste Group Bank, Banca Comerciala Romana, Intesa Sanpaolo’s Romanian unit, and Vseobecna uverova banka, according to deal advisor Kinstellar. The Vacareni project has ready-to-build status and will include 17 wind turbines.

Together, the two projects represent more than 200 MW of wind capacity in southeastern Romania, a region with strong wind resources and increasing demand for low-carbon electricity under European Union climate targets. Romania has become one of Southeast Europe’s more active renewable markets as grid modernization and policy alignment continue.

BIG MEGA Renewable Energy was created to extend the founding companies’ activities beyond traditional real estate into long-term infrastructure assets. BIG Shopping Centers and MEGA OR Holdings are both experienced developers and operators of capital-intensive, income-producing properties and are publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE).

Their renewable expansion comes during a period of strong performance on the Israeli stock market. Over the past three years, Israel’s major indices — including the TA-125 and TA-35 — have delivered some of the strongest cumulative returns among developed markets, supported by gains in technology, finance, real estate, and defense-related sectors. This market strength has increased international visibility of Israeli public companies and supported their ability to expand abroad.

Foreign investors cannot invest directly in BIG MEGA Renewable Energy (on Crunchbase), which is a private joint venture led by Eran Davidi. However, they can gain indirect exposure by investing in its publicly listed parent companies through institutional brokers, global investment banks, Israel-focused equity funds, or international ETFs that track Israeli equities.

BIG MEGA has not yet announced a commercial operation date for the Vacareni wind farm, nor any additional project phases. But the two successive financings — in 2024 and 2026 — show a steady, project-by-project strategy rather than a single one-off investment, reflecting a longer-term commitment to Romania’s renewable energy market.

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The Red Sea is in danger of environmental degradation. Saudi Arabia is building its so called eco city Neom on the Red Sea, tourism in Sinai is ruining reefs and an oil and gas pipeline using cargo ships is planned from Saudi Arabia up through Israel. Catastrophes can strike at any moment. Even now an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen seized by rebels can blow up spilling more oil than the Exxon Valdez into the Red Sea.

Who is going to help? The Red Sea Reef Foundation (RSRF) has awarded research grants to five scientists from Israel and Jordan who are studying corals in one of the world’s largest marine refuges from climate change. Each selected project involves an innovative approach, such as using deep neural networks to derive data on coral reef fish populations, characterizing corals’ changing microbiome, and developing coral bioindicators of heavy metal pollution in seawater and of coral resilience to stress from rising ocean temperatures.

Four of the selected projects could be applied to monitor the health of reefs in new ways, while a fifth aims to refine techniques for farming corals both in the Red Sea and beyond. This type of work is key to conservation of coral reef ecosystems. With 90% of the world’s coral reefs expected to be severely degraded by mid-century due to warming ocean temperatures, the study and conservation of the thermally resilient reefs in the northern Red Sea are a global imperative. These reefs may be among the last to survive our century, as they can thrive even if their environment warms by several degrees centigrade.

Karine Kleinhaus, President and Founder of the Red Sea Reef Foundation commented “Each awardee is a graduate or post-graduate student doing innovative science. Graduate students with new ideas need support to move their research, and the field, forward. It is exciting to support local scientific capacity in the Red Sea region, as this is critical to advancing successful conservation of the Red Sea’s 4000km of unique reefs.”

The awardees are: Husam Al-Qudah, Yarmouk University, Jordan; Victor China, Ben Gurion University, Israel; Hala Ghazi, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Jordan; Naama-Rose Kochman, Bar-Ilan University, Israel; Natalie Levy, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

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