The authorities want, by removing the barriers brought by GEO 114, to create the free market mechanisms through which the prices in the energy market are self-regulated, said Economy Minister Virgil Popescu.

“The fact that we have the Oltenia Energy Complex, which has a very high cost of CO2 certificates, brings the price in the market up and obviously all the producers line up and go up. Who suffers? The industrial customers, the competitiveness of the Romanian industry. Here we have to find a mechanism in such a way as to reduce this price increase, and in a free market such a thing could not have happened so brutally,” said Popescu, quoted by Agerpres.

“The fact that GEO 114 has brought down the price of manufacturers sales to suppliers for domestic customers, has given them the possibility that in compensation they raise the price very high for industrial customers. If we had a free market there would not have been such big discrepancies. And that’s what we want. Let’s put the free market mechanisms back in place, because in a free market things are self-regulated. And for natural gas, up to a month and a half and two ago, we had another paradox. The price of natural gas in Romania was higher than the price of the Hungarian and Austrian stock exchanges. However, we are natural gas producers. The same discrepancies were also made in the natural gas market. This is what we want by removing the barriers of GEO 114, to create the free market mechanisms so that next year we will no longer have these problems,” added Popescu.