Autonomous Thermal Energy Distribution (RADET) filed an action in court against ANRE seeking the annulment of two orders of the Authority on the grounds that fosters cross-subsidies at ELCEN.

“We seek the annulment of those two orders that set out the methodology for calculating the tariff for heating. The two orders have articles that favor the transfer of electricity production costs to the cost of heat production, in plain language a cross-subsidy which is prohibited also by the Romanian law, (…) but especially by European directives”, said Gabriel Dumitraşcu, Chairman of the Board at RADET.

The action was announced since July 2015, when Gabriel Dumitraşcu said: “The price of heat supplied by ELCEN is high because of unjustifiable reasons; we will soon file an action in court by which we advertise that ELCEN makes a cross-subsidy, transferring some of the costs of electricity production to the costs of thermal energy. (…) We will advertise this fraud. The Energy Law prohibits cross-subsidies between heat and electricity production costs. In essence, we suspect that in the Capital, ELCEN turns part of the production costs of electricity on the production costs of thermal energy, thus raising the bills in Bucharest”.

ANRE catalogs this request as “unfounded” since there is no allocation of costs between electricity and heat. And ELCEN, the company that generates more than 95% of the thermal energy distributed by RADET in Bucharest, said that “there is no targeted cost of electricity to charge the costs for heat.”