Senators from the Energy, Energy Infrastructure and Mineral Resources Committee and the Economy, Industries and Services Committee voted in a joint session to amend the bill by which already existing prosumers would have been obliged to install electricity storage capacities, eliminating this provision. The legislative draft, sent back to parliament by the president in July, did not correspond in any way to the legislative principle of non-retroactivity.
“We cannot change the rules during the game,” said the chairman of the Energy Commission, UDMR senator Antal Lóránt.
The draft law approving an emergency government order to prepare the legislative framework for the transition period after the removal of energy price caps passed the Senate without crucial changes back in April, but was hastily amended in the last session of the Chamber of Deputies from the last session, in June. The amendment introduced the obligation to install storage capacities for already existing prosumers that have production capacities between 3 and 400 kW by the end of 2027, otherwise they would be limited in the amount they can inject into the grid. The amendment submitted in this regard not only brought obligations applicable retroactively to prosumers, it also did not correspond to the principle of bicameralism, not being subject to the analysis of the Senate committees.
After the re-examination of the project was requested by the President of Romania, it entered the debate in the Senate, the Energy and Economic Committees postponing the vote on it from last Tuesday by a week, with the aim of being able to make an informed decision based on the data and the analyzes required from the relevant institutions in this case: the Ministry of Energy, AFM and ANRE. In relation to these requested data, Senator Antal informed that until the beginning of the meeting, none of these institutions provided any precise answer regarding storage in the case of prosumers.
“Despite the actions of the PNL and the USR, which took advantage of the media attention given to this law to place themselves in the position of so-called saviors and propel themselves into the electoral race, I believe that prosumers cannot become the subject of political polemics! We came up with the most natural and normal solution, which is hard to understand in Romania: we cannot change the rules during the game! We cannot oblige people who made the decision to become prosumers under certain legal circumstances valid in the past to comply with new provisions, adopted through changes that do not respect the principle of non-retroactivity. This principle is generally valid for all areas of activity in social and economic life, as it is for prosumers. The law voted and altered in the last hundred meters of the parliamentary session passed in the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies had to be improved,” also said Antal Lóránt, after the vote.
“We, the UDMR, have always supported the prosumers, as we did through the project initiated by me, through which we want to expand the rights of the prosumers, a law that would make it possible to financially compensate the energy surplus at monthly intervals, the compensation gas bills with this surplus and its redirection to other consumption points; as we also did by eliminating the so-called sun tax; and as it did from the very beginning, in 2019, when we created the necessary legal framework for a person to become a prosumer,” he added.
The bill voted in the committees will enter the debate of the full Senate next week.
