Prosumers will become an important pillar in the field of renewable energy in Romania. At the beginning of this year, their number reached 108,000. Of these, over 60% built their photovoltaic units with their own funds or bank loans, said Dan Pîrșan, president of the Association of Prosumers and Energy Communities (APCE) in an interview for Energynomics.
“Out of the 108,000 prosumers, it seems that only 40,000 would have turned to the Casa Verde program, the remaining over 60% invested their own money or money from loans. (…) At the same time, many prosumers have installed equipment with powers of 5-6 kW instead of 3 kW”, said Pîrșan.
The 108,000 prosumers in Romania have photovoltaic energy production capacities with a cumulative installed power of 1.4 GW.
Among them, 90,309 household prosumers own installations with a capacity between 1 and 27 kW. The total installed capacity on this segment represents 730 MW, equivalent to half of the total capacity of prosumers on the local market.
The industrial prosumers, which have production units of 27-200 kW, number 15,502 and accumulate an installed power of 447 MW.
The third segment, which includes the installed capacities of 200-400 kW, counts 510 prosumers. They own 280 MW of installed capacity in total.
The future European Parliament will issue a directive strictly related to prosumers “which will clarify all aspects related to them”, Pîrșan also recalled.
From his point of view, the AFM Casa Verde program was beneficial for Romania, although the 2022 stage “was settled very hard” and there are still installers who have not recovered the funds invested in photovoltaic panels.
According to Pîrșan, the storage part of the energy obtained from renewable sources can offer partial energy independence to the prosumers, but this provision “comes extremely late in Romania and has been neglected for a long time”.
“The investment in photovoltaic panels is a long-term one, and if it is made with good-quality equipment it can provide after 25 years of use up to 80% of the energy produced on the first day. The difference between the good products and the others is somewhere around 7-10%, but considering that it is a long-term investment, it is worth it”, he added.
At the same time, energy communities will be the next step that prosumers will take in order to ensure their energy independence.
In Europe, there are more than 1,500 such communities that have more than 1.5 million people. These communities buy energy from prosumers, sell it to residential customers in the surrounding area, and reinvest the profits in green energy. Thus, they manage to keep the price of energy produced and supplied to consumers at a lower level compared to the price of energy supplied at the national level.
APCE attracted 38 members in the first ten days after its establishment and expects to enrol another 17 prosumers in the near future. “Statistically, we are doing extremely well”, said Dan Pîrșan, the president of the Association of Energy Prosumers and Communities.
