“You can’t be sure of the supply flow when it comes to renewable energy sources,” said Eric Stab. “The government must find solutions (to support conventional power plants – e.n.).”
Producers of renewable energy benefit from government support via a green certificates scheme, which allows them to recover part of the production costs. Each renewable energy producer is granted a number of green certificates for power fed into the electricity grid. The subsidies are not available for producers of conventional energy.
“There is much talk about stimuli for renewables; conventional power companies should benefit from support as well,” said Cristina Popescu, general manager of Giga Energy.
Romanian authorities have announced several projects to build new thermal power plants that would replace aging units, but none of the projects has materialized so far. Furthermore, the only power plants built in the past years were funded exclusively from private sources.