The other day, I saw how Minister Sebastian Bourduya answered a journalist’s question: “Is there enough money in the 2024 budget for the Ministry of Energy?” The response was diplomatic, defending the government of which he is a part! …but that’s how luck was distributed’…

We know that the Ministry of Energy will not have the necessary money for the planned projects, and the minister cannot claim this.

The problem is that public administration institutions dispose of funds related to energy, but these are wasted funds that could be directed to the relevant ministry.

Most of the money earmarked for waste is contained in the Anghel Saligny program and is intended for the development of gas distribution networks. The amount is 7.5 billion lei. Why is the cost not worth it? If we go a few kilometers from Bucharest, we will see new gas networks that do not have consumers. There are very few rural families who have installed gas for heating at home. To pump gas just for cooking is not worth the investment! Why didn’t the people in the village get gas, even though the pipe passes through their gate? Because heating with individual gas installations requires large capital investments and today heating with these installations is extremely expensive. There are families who are in disguised energy poverty, unable to afford heating costs. (here is a great article on this topic) Let’s also add that from 2030 individual TPPs will no longer be able to be sold, and from 2040 they will be banned. Data on how much has been spent from this program at the moment is not public, but it is known for sure that several billion lei are left.

The second source can be the funds of the Ecological Fund. We have three programs that we can easily opt out of.

The first is Casa Verde – Photovoltaics. Although this was very successful, we found that over 1,000 MW of PV installed by consumers started to create grid balancing problems for distributors and operators due to the lack of storage, which is extremely expensive. The second reason is that Europe, after leaving the Russian gas monopoly, fell under the Chinese monopoly on metals and rare earth elements, which is wrong. In 2023, approx. 1.75 billion lei. Probably, in 2024, there will be half a billion lei.

The second project from AFM where money can be provided to the Ministry of Energy is Rabla Plus. Most of the electric cars purchased under the program are either Chinese (the brand is not important, and let’s not forget that Dacia Spring is also made in China), or necessarily have Chinese batteries. I said above that the monopoly on the raw materials from which batteries are made belongs to China. We also believe that electric cars are (yet) unreliable and there is no technology to recycle these batteries. The problem is that in the current situation, the European Union has realized that renewable energy and battery-powered electric vehicles do not represent the future, and there is already a question of redirecting the funds allocated for them.

And from this it follows that the third program, the one designed for the purchase of charging stations with normal power of electric cars, no longer makes sense, especially since their charging takes an extremely long time. There would still be half a billion lei.

We could also detect the leakage of money from the state budget. Romania was fined 118,484,800 euros for not recycling plastic containers. This means another half a billion lei. In addition to the fact that there are companies that have the ability to recycle all plastic packaging, which would mean a reduction in energy consumption of up to 75%, there are also technologies that can convert all solid waste (MSW) into energy. (I wrote about this topic here and here) Isn’t it easier to allocate this money to energy producers so that they “extract” energy from the DMS?

We collect 8.5 billion lei from the first call alone!

And we found another source of money for the Ministry of Energy. Information appeared in the press that there are 1,500 citizens who receive money… Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro