The watchword in absolutely all the recent debates, including in FOREN – an event organized by CNR-CME this month, was “storage”. The network is no longer coping, with major problems at the local level during certain peak periods, as stated by several prosumers.
The measures taken by the Parliament, therefore, do not represent a surprise, although, again, the involved parties were insufficiently consulted, or the opinions of the relevant associations were not taken into account.
Thus, as the Intelligent Energy Association (AEI) claims, “two legislative changes were made in the Chamber of Deputies that will impact domestic and non-domestic consumers in Romania. The lobby at the end of the activity of the Romanian legislature brings the Romanian consumers again in the situation of taking money out of their pockets.”
According to these changes, existing prosumers, who own photovoltaic panel systems with installed powers between 10.8 kW and 400 kW, will also be obliged to install storage facilities for the renewable electricity produced. The storage facilities of the prosumers must each have a capacity of at least 30% of the installed capacity of the production units with which they are associated, for capacities of the latter between 3 and 200 kW, and of at least 50%, for capacities of production units between 200 and 400 kW. The deadline for compliance with the obligation to install storage facilities is December 31, 2027.
“The partial storage of electricity produced by prosumers is a normal measure, for reasons of resilience, safety and energy security. But this had to be done from the very beginning, so that the investment is analyzed from a correct economic point of view and above all the existing prosumers are not put in the aberrant situation of changing (throwing away) functional equipment in the on-grid regime, which have barely were purchased (and are not amortized) and make additional expenses (with the modification of the feasibility indicators from the time the investment was made). There are prosumers (Fostering Centers, Nursing Homes, etc.) who have made enormous efforts to install such equipment, at the limit of economic subsistence, and now they are forced to take out of their pockets another thousands of euros through the effect of the law in order to change a part from equipment and install storage batteries.
I appreciate that this approach is abusive and carried out in an amateurish way, only in order to allow some companies to sell their products”, comments Dumitru Chisăliță, president, AEI.
The obligations provided by the law can be mandatory for all prosumers who will install their PV systems after the law is approved (even removing the lower power threshold for which this obligation exists), and for existing prosumers there should be a support scheme so that they reach the level of normality that the law of prosumers had to foresee from the very beginning.
“The second blow given to the Romanians is related to the fact that the Deputies adopted, quickly before, a project for the modification and completion of Law 372/2005 on the energy performance of buildings, by which it is desired to remove gas plants from apartments that do not correspond to the new indices of energy performance and their replacement with:
- a) heating systems based on renewable energy sources (heating systems);
- b) heating systems based on cogeneration/trigeneration;
- c) connection to the current systems of urban heating or cooling networks;
- d) heat pumps, solar thermal and/or electric panels, wind power plants, as well as combined systems;
- e) capturing energy from the environment through soil-air heat exchangers;
- f) capturing energy wasted in other processes through heat recovery devices;
What is less known is the fact that at the moment the Ecodesign Regulation is in the works, which is to establish the new energy performance indices of apartment thermal centrals. The debate of the last 2 years, with many accusations of lobbying brought to some manufacturers of new technologies, which introduced in various work variants indicators impossible to reach by gas plants and in fact thus they eliminated themselves, has not yet been concluded. Thus, the Romanian Law opens the direct path to a possible elimination of gas power plants, the future Ecodesign Regulation being mandatory for Romania”, adds the president of AEI.
In December 2023, when the Directive just approved in the Chamber of Deputies appeared, we pointed out that “this European directive that prohibits the use of central heating systems cannot be applied in Romania, at least for now, and that the authorities in Bucharest must negotiate its implementation. ”
“So that Romania receives a derogation from the other countries, at least a postponement from the implementation of the directive as it is now.”
“The European leaders must understand that we simply have a different consumption scheme. However, from a technical point of view, we cannot switch to other energy sources in this interval. We have neither the time nor the money nor the necessary manpower. Let’s take the switch to power plants as an example. I don’t see how millions of homes could be switched to “electric” when that means a consumption of at least 14-15 kW/h, even 30 kW/h in larger homes, and now the consumption per household is 1 or 2 kW/h. This means a resizing of unimaginable proportions of the electricity networks throughout the country. They would be difficult works to conceive and design, but also to realize. As a conclusion, we need to play our card, state our point of view, explain that we have other resources and remember that in the 90s we broke the record by reducing carbon emissions even six times. Sure, rules can be imposed, but only for new projects, I think. Easy, easy, but in a natural way, we will also be able to enter this European current,” added Chisăliță.
If the European countries have a justification in choosing to ban the use of gas, their access to gas being more and more limited as time goes by and gas resources will be less and less, Romania is going to invest several billion euros to exploit the gas from the Black, a few hundred million more to develop gas transport and distribution networks, and a few thousand more euros from each family to make their internal installations and buy their gas plants, which “will be extracted from people’s houses ” even before it wears off in Romanians’ homes.
AEI proposed as early as 2021 a Building Heating Program which was supposed to include – Local Energy Using (LES) – the predominant use of local energy resources and Unique Energy Grid (UEG) – the development within large towns of several heating systems quarter for the production and distribution of heat and cold with horizontal distribution to consumers.
