Prosumers in Romania have reached a total of 1 GW in renewable energy generation units, and the authorities aim to finance, through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), the commissioning of electricity storage capacities in 480 MW batteries.
“We as a country cannot oppose the trend of prosumers. At the end of June we had more than 1 GW installed in the capacities held by prosumers, but this capacity will increase in 2024. It is also important to develop storage capacities that do not only refer to batteries, but we consider the use of all available technologies”, stated Dan Drăgan, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Energy, during the DigitALL 2023 conference, organized by Energynomics.
According to him, the measure will also contribute to the balancing of the electricity distribution and transmission network. The development of energies from renewable sources will also contribute to changing consumer behavior, and in this area energy suppliers will also have an important role, by creating new products.
Energy consumers in Romania may prefer, however, to profile their energy consumption through a dynamic allocation of the price according to the settlement intervals, at which point the need for investments in batteries will decrease significantly.
“We will, I think, have a surprise in that we will not need as many storage capacities as is being talked about, because there is a huge potential for profiling consumption according to energy production. A consumer will be more interested in profiling their consumption than paying extra for storage capacity,” added the Secretary of State.
Drăgan stated that the plan to install renewable capacities of 950 MW will soon enter the implementation phase, a plan financed by NRRP, but this target “will be significantly exceeded”. More than 70% of the beneficiaries of this scheme are industrial prosumers.
To meet the commissioning of these new energy production capacities, the Ministry of Energy signed contracts worth over 470 million euros with the system operator Transelectrica for the strengthening and digitalization of the energy transmission network. In addition, the institution is analyzing other similar projects worth 150 million euros.
In parallel, the Ministry of Energy signed contracts with distribution companies for over 100 million euros, out of a total of 1.3 billion euros of available funding.
“I think that household consumption will also develop, and distribution companies will have to deal with these changes. We will develop financial instruments to help this transformation”, said Drăgan.
The DigitALL 2023 conference was organized by Energynomics, in partnership with the CIO Council and with the support of our partners Eaton Electric, Huawei, NextGen, Schneider Electric, Siemens.