The draft bill stipulates, among others, a temporary cutback in the number of green certificates granted to renewable energy producers, and regulates trading of green certificates on the local energy exchange OPCOM.
“The bill brings several improvements to the initial law. The only clause that bothers investors refers to the fact that the certificates will be collected by the energy watchdog ANRE, which will establish a secondary legal framework on how they should be used,” Nita told the Mediafax Talks about Energy seminar.
Nita said Romania has the most renewable energy support scheme in the European Union. However, the country’s outdated transmission system was not ready to deal with the inflow of investments in the green sector.
“It is our duty to think about the missing interconnections. We are already overproducing energy and no one is consuming it. The industry is at full capacity,” Nita told reporters.
Romanian 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, which are eventually passed onto consumers’ electricity bills, are not available for producers of conventional energy.
The government recently announced that it would temporarily reduce the number of green certificates in the scheme to prevent a sharp rise in electricity prices. The measure will be applied between July 2013 and December 2016.