Investments in distribution grids are key to improving customer service, says Volker Raffel, CEO of E.ON Romania, just hours after the regulatory authority ANRE set a low regulated rate of return (RRR) for distribution companies. He streeses the need to invest double or triple, as market conditions and demands are totally different for the fifth regulatory period (2025-2029).
ANRE set the RRR two days befor at just below 7%, upsetting all distribution and transport operators alike, who complain that this number (6.94%) is too low to sustain their future investments.
”We’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: investments in distribution grids are key to improving customer service, but more than that, they will pave the way for the ‘democratization’ of access to green energy, with direct and indirect benefits across the economy. In the coming period, however, we need to invest double, maybe even triple than we have been able to do so far, because the current challenges are completely different from those of 10 years ago, and now we look ahead on how we want to be in the next 10 years. With a fair and stimulating regulatory framework we can make tomorrow start today,” Raffel wrote on his LinkedIn page.
”Under six minutes a month. And just over an hour during a whole year. That’s how long Delgaz Grid customers in the Moldova area stayed without electricity in 2023, due to unplanned outages. Of course, in an ideal world, with perfect grids, we should talk about zero interruptions in the supply of energy. In the real world, however, everything is perfectible,” he said.
”Therefore, viewed objectively, from the outside, these numbers may not say much. But for us, and for me personally, they are a great reason to be proud, because they reflect the performance achieved through hard work, consistency and ambition, and, in addition, demonstrate once again how important it is to continue to invest year after year in modernization of grids.
”To give you a clearer idea, if we refer to 2017, the time during which our customers were without light in their homes was reduced by no less than 6 times. And if we look at the situation before privatization, in 2005, we see a 24 times improvement, because then a customer was in the dark for 30 hours a year, that is two and a half hours a month,” Raffel added.
In technical terms, the indicator regarding the average duration of unplanned interruptions in the grid (unplanned SAIDI), decreased, in 2023, to 67.93 minutes/year, DelgazGrid thus marking the best performance in the entire energy distribution sector. And this for the third year in a row, according to the Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority’s reports.
And in terms of the frequency of unplanned outages (unplanned SAIFI), Delgaz Grid managed to achieve the best results, among the distribution operators in Romania, with an average of less than one outage per customer in 2023, half compared with the country average.
