This statement was made shortly after the Romanian authorities contracted a €19.95 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission, the World Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). “I hope we will be able to identify the necessary financial arrangement. The solution is a foreign loan of several billion euro to focus on modernizing these plants. I believe that the government must make this courageous decision,” said Prime Minister Emil Boc. The official estimated that this “massive investment” will be recovered in 10 years, as a result of savings generated by ensuring this source of energy. “We may begin negotiations for this loan as early as this year. We will initiate talks with the IMF and the European Commission to see how we can meet the budget deficit targets,” the Prime Minister added. “If you ask the mayors, 9 of 10 will tell you that their priority is heating,” Boc said, adding that state subsidies cannot solve the problem.
Specialists interviewed by Business Standard have reservations regarding the plan announced by the Prime Minister, but insist that there are major losses in the system, and a solution must be identified immediately, separate from political campaign interests. The former attaché of Romania to the EUon energy affairs, Razvan Nicolescu, said that, by way of this announcement, the government in engaging in “a very ambitious project.” “I wish for this intention to succeed. Until then, there are private companies that plan or are already building own cogeneration energy plants with new and high-level technology,” added Nicolescu.
“The current cogeneration plants are old, oversized, and inefficient, with high costs. Moreover, due to their age, these have major pollution problems which cannot be solved by accessing help schemes,” said the Corporate Affairs Manager of the CEZ Romania energy company, Adrian Borotea. Analyst Jean Constantinescu, former President of the Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE), said that “contracting a loan would be a mistake considering that the program to modernize the thermoelectric system, developed in 2005-2007, when some €700 million was allocated, was a failure. This money was wasted.”
“I was one of the people who initially supported apartment building heating systems, when these started to become popular in Romania. I can tell you, from my experience as mayor, and from my short experience as Prime Minister, that these apartment systems are not the way of the future. I saw it in the European Union also. Maybe at some time it was a good solution for Romanian families, but in the medium and long- run, the solution is not individual systems, but rather a centralized, efficient, and properly-sized system,” Boc said.
