“With our green energy investments we’ve reached our green certificate targets. We don’t want to create surplus,” said Francesco Starace, chief executive officer of the Italian utilities group.
The group has reached a balance and is satisfied with what it has for the time being, he added.
Enel announced a EUR17 billion investment program in 2016-2019, more that half of which will go towards clean energy. It integrated Enel Green Power, its clean energy division, for improved flexibility.
In Romania, however, it was forced to take an impairment of EUR155 million of renewable energy assets due to the legislative changes that affected profitability of such investments. In all, Enel invested almost EUR800 million in Romania, especially in wind farms, and its total capacity stands at 534 MW.
As a result, the group will direct investments towards the distribution structure on long-term at least on the local market. Enel is preparing EUR630 million investments in the electricity distribution networks in Romania by 2019 and hopes to boost customer base from 2.7 million to 2.9 million consumers. Enel is also the largest private power distributor in Romania, operating in three regions, Muntenia Sud, Banat and Dobrogea.
According to the information supplied by the company, consumers had to put up with 238 minutes (4 hours) of unplanned power outages last year, which is the indicator that best reflects the performance of the power distribution infrastructure. Romania, a market, which is just starting to implement smart meters, while Italy is, now at its second generation of such devices, can compare to Chile, where Enel has 1.8 million consumers and unplanned outages lasted 202 minutes.
“At the end of this period (2019 i.e.) we will have 2.7 million smart meters in Romania. We are also carefully considering the necessary electric car infrastructure,” said Livio Gallo, head of Global Infrastructure and Network Division with Enel.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)