Bogdan Tudorache

Although the liberalization of the gas market has been prepared for 15 years, there has been no consumer education project from the state, says Dumitru Chisăliță, president of the Intelligent Energy Association (AIE), in an open letter addressed to the Minister of Economy.

“The moment you send an untrained consumer on the battlefield of market liberalization, it is not the fault of the suppliers that it will defeat him,” the document reads.

Thus, the Intelligent Energy Association requests the emergency establishment of a SAL type entity, as defined by Ordinance 38/2015, which transposes European Directive 11/2013.

”The center for Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Field of Natural Gas (SAL-GAZ) is needed for the development of information programs for the preparation of household consumers, so that they can negotiate their contracts for the purchase of natural gas on a liberalized market and allow the alternative settlement of gas market disputes,” claims AIE.

“Mr. minister, you cannot expect the supplier to come with small supply margins, when the institutions of the state that oversee the market put on the market instruments that confuse the consumer (the gas price comparator), which contains erroneous data, which is not updated, in which no one checks and eliminates incorrect offers. If the institutions of the state are not interested in how to get fair offers to consumers, why would the suppliers be interested?

Suppliers are ‘bad’, because the law requires them (profit maximization), but maybe worse is the Romanian state that does not educate its people, does not defend it, does not support it and does not sustain it, sends it into a war, of liberalization, from which few will emerge as winners.”