The National Regulatory Authority for Energy – ANRE has approved the tariffs for electricity distribution service for 2019 with a national average increase of 0.74%. ANRE calculated that the impact on the household consumer with average consumption (100 kWh/month) will be about 3.5 lei per year.

The Authority states that it has ensured “a real balance between the objectives of the distribution operators and the interests of the distribution service users, by setting justified costs”. Also, the approved changes would have removed “past deficiencies in the structure of costs recognized in tariffs” and “increasing the efficiency of investments in distribution networks”.

2019 is the first year of the 4th regulatory period, which will last for the next 5 years. When setting the tariffs for this period, ANRE made corrections about 1.13 billion lei worth in total, mainly consisting in rejecting some costs related to investments from previous periods and in the transfer to the customers of efficiency gains made by the distribution operators.

In order to increase the quality of the distribution service, ANRE requires operators to increase the volume of investments so that they will equal to the cost of depreciation, at least, while imposing on operators targets of reducing their own technological consumption by about 25% in low-voltage networks. “Thus, a total operating expenses of 8.63 billion lei were approved, by about 0.5 million lei more than in the previous period, while the total value for the investment programs is 6.35 billion lei, for the next 5 years.”

The Authority points out that “although the share of direct costs in the network has increased, it is noted that the approved tariffs did not increase significantly, as the profitability of operators was reduced to a reasonable level by approving a regulated rate of return of 5.66%”.