Automation company Enevo Group makes over 80 percent of its turnover from projects abroad, said its CEO Cristian Pîrvulescu at the conference DigitALL 2021, organized by Energynomics. “It was much easier for us to identify business opportunities outside Romania. In Romania, we are talking about a small market, which hasn’t been done much for decades. At least in the power sector, there have been small projects related to power plants, power lines, power stations, infrastructure. In the last 30 years we only had two really big system projects; I am not talking about repairs and rehabilitation. I think that we can access all the knowledge in the world in order to build a business infrastructure, there are technologies – such as those from ABB or Aveva, but we need projects to implement such technologies. And we need a functioning market,” Pîrvulescu said.
“We are working for the largest oil and gas company in the world, Aramco, for the largest steelworks, and in the energy sector the need for digitization is as old as the energy itself. For us, digitization means in part automation; we work very hard on SCADA systems, on the area of renewable and traditional power plants, in the process automation area and we are an integrator and a solution engineer,” Pîrvulescu added.
“Technology exists, we just need to write some specifications to describe the ultimate need for the process we want to digitalize. Moreover, in our field we are in a dilemma – we have an exceptionally good IT school in Romania, and it is good based on the simple fact that there are programming tools that we can use, accessible at decent costs, and self-learning is, in this area, the most convenient. In the field of energy, however, we have this big problem, simply because we also need the technology specialists. When we talk about digitalizing a system that includes temperatures, currents, pressures, the equipment specialist, the technologist is indispensable. The lack of projects in Romania over the last 30 years takes its due in this field of technology,” Pîrvulescu said.
We signed our first major cyber security contract with a TSO
“And there is also this another problem when it comes to implementing digital solutions: we have a lot of old, legacy-type equipment around the world. They are designed to last 25 years It is very easy to ask for new equipment, but, for example, in a steel plant, it means you have stop the steel plant for a year and a half – it’s all about CAPEX and opportunity cost. In the energy industry we are facing structural changes, but we operate the same old infrastructure,” he said. Thus, even if the grid, which was until recently centralized, tends now toward decentralization, it needs major changes in order to accommodate, for example, the renewables.
“In December 2020, we signed our first major cyber security contract with a major transport operator (TSO) in Europe. It is an extraordinary exercise, and I think it is one of the few private contracts signed at this level. It is an extraordinary school for us, and I would very much like to bring to Romania the know-how we accumulate abroad, if anyone would find it valuable,” said the CEO of Enevo.
DigitALL 2021 was organized by Energynomics, in partnership with reputed organizations such as AHK Romania, CIO Council, BusinessMark with the support of our partners: ABB România, ACE – Industrial Software Solutions, Enevo Group, Safetech Innovations.
