The pollution reduction targets set by Brussels are becoming more and more ambitious, and one of the reasons is that those that were previously set have not been reached, says Adrian Ghiță, Executive Director of the Romanian Energy Efficiency Fund (FREE).

“The EU targets for the year 2050 are primarily aimed at our children because they will be fully active at that time. We, as acting professionals now, must prepare the transition to this goal by ensuring that the partial targets for 2030 are met. I believe that we are not yet convinced enough and we do not, each of us in our households or in the organizations where we work, make sufficient efforts for a cleaner environment”, said Adrian Ghiță during the conference “Energy efficiency for the energy transition – Brașov”.

For Romania, reaching these targets means reducing gross energy consumption by up to 45% compared to the PRIMES 2007 reference level and, even if in order to achieve this goal, a lot of energy investments are needed, i.e. several billion euros, Romania, through government programs, has the “theoretical” ability to access these funds. Even though, through grant programs, the Romanian government remains the largest and most interesting financier in the field of energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources, it is the intention of private financiers, such as FREE, to harmonize their products to support the promotion of financing schemes non-refundable administered by the ministries.

In its 20 years of existence, FREE has concluded equity financing contracts with a total value of 29.93 million US dollars for various energy efficiency investments. These have facilitated, thanks to the FREE customers’ own contribution, the implementation of cumulative investments of over 86 million US dollars, resulting in an estimated reduction of the carbon footprint of 205,000 tons of CO2 per year. “We are interested in any public or private client from Romania. It is cheaper to save a unit of energy than to purchase it. We are open for partnerships. We want to attract additional sources of funding to help implement more projects for efficient use of energy because we have the capacity to do it”, said Adrian Ghiță.

The conference in Brașov was the first of a series of 5 scheduled by the Energynomics communication platform, the Romanian Fund for Energy Efficiency – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy. The project is financed by Norway Grants 2014-2021.