President of the Competition Council, Bogdan Chiriţoiu, considers that things regarding the liberalization of the energy market are going well and cannot be reversed, but claims that he expected more consumers to use the opportunity to switch to more advantageous gas contracts.
“There are interesting times in energy. It’s an opportunity to innovate and make things better, which must be cheaper or not very expensive and with a lower ecological impact than at the moment (…). I talk to company executives and I understand that they are going through an experience that they are less familiar with, but that’s the situation, we all need to adapt and use change as an opportunity to do good things. Regarding the liberalization of the energy market, things are going well and they can’t be reversed. We certainly had a good gas situation and that helped us. I’m sorry that many of the consumers didn’t use the opportunity to switch to more advantageous contracts for gas, we are somewhere at around a third of them. I expected this third to be represented by those who have higher consumption, but unfortunately this third reflects the average consumer, who uses gas for cooking, so a low consumption. It seems that this window of opportunity that existed last year, when gas was quite cheap compared to the previous period, is closing. We have warned companies that we will be very strict if we see efforts to block the movement of customers. We have investigations in the area of electricity, where notifications we have received from the market show the obstruction of the movement of customers from current suppliers to new ones. At the same time, we are paying attention to the gas area,” mentioned Chiriţoiu, during the 7th edition of the Energy Strategy Summit, an event organized by Energynomics.
The President of the Competition Council also specified that the institution he leads will carry out a series of controls at the energy companies regarding the application of the legislation on the extension of the gas and electricity networks and on what the connection means for the new consumers.
“Another area of interest, and we have warned companies that we will carry out controls, is the application of legislation on the expansion of gas and electricity networks, the connection of new consumers. On one hand, we all understand that the legislation is not perfect and difficult to enforce. Imperfect and difficult to apply does not mean that it does not exist and that it does not apply, we will carry out a series of control actions on both the electricity and the gas area, at the same time we will support the industry in making the law aplicable. The result of the change in legislation must be to make it work, not to abandon its goal of expanding networks into consumer facilities for access to gas and electricity at reasonable costs. The effort must come from large companies, not from to poorer consumers, who have completely different possibilities than a large utility company,” the head of the competition authority stressed, according to Agerpres.
