The Competition Council is willing to accept the exemption of renewable energy producers from the exchange trading obligation, said on Monday, Bogdan Chiriţoiu, president of the institution, during the Energy Transition 2017 conference, organized by RWEA (Romanian Wind Energy Association).

“The problem that we have in Romania is that the big electricity producers we have are state-owned and regarding the large state-owned companies we suspect them of corruption. Hence the ban for these companies than cannot perform anymore long-term bilateral agreements because we are afraid of what they would do, what would happen with these agreements if we let the large state producers to conclude them”, said Chiriţoiu, according to Agerpres.

He mentioned that the legislation obliges all energy producers to sell the available electricity on the stock exchange, after the scandal related to the bilateral agreements with the so-called “smart boys” in energy, which strongly affects producers from renewable sources, especially the little ones.

Chiriţoiu argues, however, that he would support an initiative to exempt small producers from this general rule.

“This obligation to trade on the stock exchange is also imposed upon private operators. We cannot separate the large state producers from the rest of the industry and punish everyone with things that are not necessarily economically rational. We need to look at what small means, what capacity, in order to make exceptions, because not everyone can trade on the stock exchange and cannot have a trading department, it is an economic ensemble adapted for the big players. From my side there has been and there will be total openness to find exceptions where this general rule does not make sense”, said the Competition Council official.

He also said he is willing to accept an exception on the gas market, where there is also an intention to force producers to sell 70% of the output on the stock exchange, which would affect the Black Sea exploration and extraction projects (offshore).

“I also do not oppose to the idea of making exceptions for renewable investments, as I said we agree with offshore gas exemptions, if we are told that offshore investments are of a different nature than onshore, I do not have nothing against creating a special rule for offshore. Wherever we do not have large state-owned companies, we have to show flexibility. On the other hand, rightly, we still do not have enough confidence in the quality of governance from the large state-owned companies to let them free to behave like any player on the market”, continued Chiriţoiu.