Competition Council recommends that the Romanian-owned railway company, CFR, allow freight operators to choose their energy suppliers, according to a press release sent to Energynomics.

Thus, the Council requests CFR to ensure “the creation of the technical conditions so that the Railway Transmission Operators (OTF) can choose their electricity supplier, which would lead to the reduction of the value of the traction current bills, which the OTF pay and, implicitly, to increase the profitability of rail freight transport and lower tariffs for users of this service,” it is also shown in the release.

“Currently, OTF do not have the possibility to link their electricity supplier, although the energy market is liberalized, the only supplier for the railway system being Electrificare CFR, a subsidiary wholly owned by CNCF CFR SA,” the Competition officials also claim.

This recommendation follows the study conducted by the National Railway Supervisory Council (CNSDF), within the Competition Council, which summarized the main aspects that characterize the rail freight transport in Romania.

In 2020, in the conditions of the pandemic generated by SARS – Cov 2, the railway freight traffic decreased by 6.6%, and the number of freight trains put into circulation decreased by 15.4%, compared to the previous year. At the same time, the amount of goods transported by train, expressed in net-km tons, decreased by 14.7%, and OTF freight revenues decreased by 13.7%, according to the CNSDF Study.

The main OTFs, from the point of view of the revenues realized from the freight transport by rail, are: CFR Marfă, Grup Feroviar Român, Deutsche Bahn Cargo and Unicom Tranzit, and from the point of view of the Train route indicator (train-km) in traffic national and international freight, CFR Marfă and Grup Feroviar Român are the most important competitors.