The pilot projects for smart metering shows that installation of smart meters makes economic sense only in urban areas, said Emil Calotă, Vice President of the National Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE), at the forum Smart Transformation, organized by The Diplomat. “Cost-benefit analysis shows that such investment in rural areas is not feasabile from an economic point of view,” said Calotă.

ANRE will launch in 2017 of a proposal for smart metering at a national level, but it is already clear that Romania can not reach an 80% share of electricity consumption by 2020, as it was decided by the UE regulation. In 2015 and 2016, the electricity distribution companies have run 40 pilot projects by which smart meters have been installed at almost 300.000 consumers. Total investments were 137.49 million lei, informed Emil Calotă, who mentioned two of the conclusions of the pilots:

• smart meters are not well received by consumers
• companies have not done enough to explain “why a smart meter is very necessary, practical and useful to the final consumer”

“There are many operators who think that smart meter only helps them to read consumption in real time, to reduce thefts and losses in the network and so on,” said Calotă, who insisted that the distribution operators should explain also to customers what their benefits are, such as “reading consumption in real time and providing an ideal consumption curve, while balancing consumption at individual household level”.

At the forum Smart Transformation, organized by The Diplomat, Doina Vornicu, director of operations in CEZ Romania, presented a 95 million euros worth project of the group to modernize its Romanian activities, in the period 2016-2020.

In turn, Cristian Colţeanu, President and CEO of GE Romania, developed on the goal the American originated giant has that, in the next four years, to become one of the ten largest software companies in the world. With 1,000 employees in Romania, and operating here three factories, GE will focus on the development of IoT solutions that bring together and manage machinery and industrial equipment, remotely, via the Internet.