What happened at the beginning of the year on the electricity market, when prices climbed a few figures over the average, was “the first less pleasant lesson since the opening of the market,” says Martin Zmelik, CEO, CEZ Romania. Zmelik, whose mandate in Romania has been prolonged this month for two more years, argues that authorities should focus on investigating the reasons that have led to a rise in the price of energy in the wholesale market in Romania and still keep it high enough.
In addition, new rules need to be put in place on the balancing market, and the major energy producers association ACUE is preparing a study in this regard.
“There were traders with very open and very speculative positions. Of course, when prices explode, they are not reflected immediately in the market, “says Zmelik, referring to the speculative attack on the energy market in January-February this year.
This was one of the reasons for rising prices, the other being the very strong cold that caused an increase in demand.
“In addition, Romania is becoming more integrated with the other countries, and it is related to the evolution of prices in other countries, and consumption is increasing,” he added.
“Unfortunately, there are prices in the market that do not reflect the development of the market … That’s one aspect of the discussion: how the authorities will reflect the issues in the regulated part of the market. Then, one thing that is also a question for us: everyone expects that after those crazy months the situation will calm down, but as you can see, prices in Romania are still high on the wholesale market. The authorities here should focus, on the level of the price and how the PCSU market (n.l. centralized market for universal services) and the balancing one, work,” Zmelik says.
“Rules should be introduced especially for the balancing market,” Zmelik said, explaining that there will be more opinions after the publication of the study soon to be revealed by ACUE.
The day before, the president of the Competition Council (CC), Bogdan Chiriţoiu, said that although there are some suspicions about what happened at the beginning of the year on the energy market, no guilty party of anti-competitive practices has yet been identified. Thus, the CC will open an investigation if there are sufficient indications of a violation of the law.
“There are suspicions about the things that happened in the winter and the way things are still reflected in the price of electricity. It is an area that we are monitoring, if we have enough clues, we will open an investigation. For the time being we are just analyzing, but also we are not deaf to your complaints and we do not ignore the signals we receive from the market,” said Chiriţoiu.
