Last week I wrote about how the citizen who led the Department of Energy failed to keep his promises, some of which were essential to the survival of the nation’s energy industry. If you want a list, you can read it here. To these we add a few more after he has lost his power, and we see that those who can muster courage and begin to speak.

First, I signal that winter is approaching, and the problem of heat energy is not solved. The Minister of Energy wrote to the Mayor General of Bucharest that they should meet to solve the problem. On television, the mayor replied that everything was resolved and that “it’s a technical problem.” As always, the beginning of autumn finds the unresolved problem of the Bucharest CHP: the debt to Elcen is not paid. 1,000,000,000 lei. But the City Hall still owes Elcen: 3,700,000,000 lei from the RADET days. If you do not remember it, it means that you have entered the political and villainous game of the politicians of the city of Dambovitsa! It shouldn’t be like this! Almost one billion euros must not be forgotten, it is the money of all Romanians, the two components of SACET, in turn, suffered because, being companies in a difficult situation, they cannot access national or European funds or cannot turn to banks. And you have to buy gas for the winter! We cannot cancel SACET, especially now that the European Union wants decarbonization, and the only solution for large urban agglomerations is to keep SACET in the case of Bucharest and build others in cities that can still do something similar, as I wrote a few months ago.

Professor Dumitru Kiselice draws attention to the shortcomings of legislation that limits and compensates gas and electricity prices. (if you open the link, you understand the problem.) What we deduce: we pay the energy companies through taxes and fees all these compensations, they capitalize on the huge profits, especially “renewables” are unjustly enriched, creating all kinds of problems that will be seen in in the medium and long term, because gas and coal power are also becoming “intermittent”. (explanation is written here) And moreover, being so bad, we are today in the grip of this system of capping and compensating energy prices: if we abandon it, a great injustice is created, those who consume little, that is, the poor, they will pay more, than those who consume a lot, i.e. the richest.

But two UDMR deputies who recently left the government are surprising:

“Without electricity in the strip, there is no industry, no economy,” he said Antal István Lorand, Chairman of the Committee on Energy, Energy Infrastructure and Mineral Resources in the Senate. And he continued: “Relying only on renewable energy sources is suicide.” “The current market design (that is, the current energy market, I translate) was designed to support renewable energy (…) If we stay with the reflexes and ideologies that existed before (the war), then Europe will have big problems,” he added , said Antal István Lorand. We used to know that with renewable energy alone, we would end up under China’s monopoly.

We also woke up to the statement of Mr. Bende Sandor, Chairman of the Industry and Services Committee in the Chamber of Deputies: “the lack of investment in distribution, both electricity and gas, has now begun to show.” Well, as long as the heads of NARE are appointed as they are, their resumes are full of bugs from college lockers who deal with security, and while urban legend says that in the corridors of NARE there is an alternative scheme of doldora bags of papers that they say they are “valuable”, how could NARE adequately control the distributors? … We cannot prove the rumors that after the privatization contracts of the distribution companies, through which those who seized the regional monopoly of energy distribution would be covered by the same accounts through which they are released from investment obligations. But the invoices submitted to ANRE are included in the calculation of the “distribution price” approved by ANRE itself, the price that can be found on our invoices for the five distribution tariffs:

After almost four years of the “rule” of the former minister, we have a “difficult legacy”, Romania suffers from a lack of investment in everything that means production. We understand the decommissioning of coal-fired power plants, but we do not understand why gas-fired power plants have not been replaced, developed, or reconstructed.

We can only be glad that the Ministry of Energy is finally headed by a person who understands the importance of energy security. Thus, Minister Sebastian Burduha said the other day: “Our country has undertaken to build an energy system that provides safe energy at a fair price and is as environmentally friendly as possible – in this order. Without energy there is no economic development, and without development economics there is no future,” quoting the great liberal Vintil Bratian.

Analyzing Mr. Codrianu’s graph, we notice that Greece has three times more gas production capacity, in conditions where this country has no gas resources. We understand that Greece has a different architecture of the energy system, because about half of the territory is represented by islands, that it is sunnier and the wind potential is much higher than in Romania, but we also understand that the decision makers have thought well: there are gas capacity (6,000 MW) and there is 700 MW of hydro storage capacity, which makes balancing renewable energy easy. Without an energy strategy and in our respective ministry no line of analysis filled with specialists, we come to the words of Mr. Senator Antal István and Minister Sebastian Burduža: without energy in a (safe) range, we have no industry, we have no economy!

While discussing “fair price” with a friend, he pointed out to me an anomaly that occurred in the OPCOM market the other day, asking me who was behind the “maneuver”. Curious by nature, I took the electricity generation, consumption, balance, export and import figures from the Transelectrica website to see how they had evolved. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro