One of the seven keynote speakers invited to open the 6th edition of Spring Cocktail, organized by energynomics.ro on March 27, was Corina Popescu, CEO of Electrica SA. She talked about the plans of the group’s, but also about what she believes to be of uttermost importance for the local energy industry.
“I think it is important for each of us to understand what happens around us and, based on this, to define our strategy not only for this year, but for medium and long term”, Corina Popescu argued. “I think it is important for the Romanian energy sector to be more proactive. There are a lot of good specialists working in this industry and our voices need to be much stronger in Brussels”, she urged. Corina Popescu said that it was her opinion that what the experts in the ministry of Energy are doing do “respect the best practices” at European level.
Just like the entire local energy sector, Electrica group is now in the middle of a transformation process, Corina Popescu said. “We have to cope with a lot of challenges: new regulations, new ordinances, new Directive regarding the Market Design and so on…”
Electrica will soon present a new strategy, as the existing one was published 5 years ago, in 2014, when the company was listed on the stock exchange. During the five years after the IPO, Electrica made around 3 billion lei worth investment in its distribution network and „I believe this is the right thing that we need to do in the future”, said Corina Popescu. “Without investment, I think we cannot speak about IoT, we cannot speak about digitalization, we cannot speak about other services that can be added to the existing ones.” The investment plan for the next five years is smaller (around 2.6 billion lei), but in the light of the new changes in the 114/2018 GEO, “we think to invest even more in distribution area”.
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On the supply side, Corina Popescu talked about a project to restructure the supply company, this year. “We will try to develop a lot of different types of services”, she said. “We are looking for all the national programs and for sure we will apply to them, but we are also looking to diversify our business model, in other sectors, also, in order to add value to the existing business.”