“Many consumers are looking at your buying portfolio. It’s one thing to buy (electricity i.e.) from other entities and having your own generation operation is a different thing. You no longer sell somebody else’s stuff, you sell your own,” says businessman Augustin Oancea, Tinmar-Ind’s owner explaining why he chose to expand into power generation.
Tinmar-Ind is the Romania’s largest private energy trader, accounting for 5.81% of the competitive market in 2012, according to the market regulator ANRE data.
The company buys power from producers such as Complexul Energetic Oltenia (Oltenia Energy Complex – which generates electricity using coal), Nuclearelectrica and Hidroelectrica and sells it to consumers like Automobile Dacia, Doosan IMGB and real estate developer NEPI.
Tinmar-Ind supplied 1.4 TWh of electricity or 2% of the country’s consumption last year and posted EUR311 million revenue.
Augustin Oancea says the purpose of solar PV investments was to diversify the energy sources and protect his business against price fluctuations on the market.
The company has recently connected an 18.5 MW solar farm to the grid, the largest in operation in Romania at the moment. The farm is located in Bucsani town of Giurgiu County (southern Romania) and required a EUR30 million investment, the company official said.
Tinmar will complete another solar farm, this time with a capacity of 20 MW in Gorj County (south of the country again but west of Giurgiu County) in two weeks. It already owns a solar farm in this county and one near Craiova. All these solar PV investments will take Tinmar-Ind’s capacity to 50 MW. At an average cost per megawatt of EUR1.6 million euros, its solar power investments so far should amount to about EUR80 million.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)