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The "sly guys" in energy who in the past were having huge profits with the cheap electricity from Hidroelectrica have not vanished, they are lurking at turning point and try to regain the lost privileges, the managing director of Hidroelectrica Bogdan Badea told AGERPRES in an interview.
Badea said that Hidroelectrica, the biggest energy producer of Romania is having tough battles on all fronts with the interest groups that are trying to blood-suck again the state-run company. The contracts with the "sly guys" have been canceled in 2012, after the energy producer entered insolvency.
According to Badea, the energy prices' rise lately manifested all around Europe following the high environment costs, but the difference in the invoice for an ordinary consumer is the equivalent of a cigarettes' package per month. Nevertheless, in his opinion should we wish for clean energy we must make sacrifice too in this respect.
The Hidroelectrica head has also announced an ambitious over one billion euro investment programme in the next five years that includes the purchase of some wind and photovoltaic energy producers.
According to the first nine months' outcomes, the year 2018 is very important to Hidroelectrica. The managing director estimates that by year-end, the gross profit will exceed the 2-billion lei psychological threshold as against 1.6 billion lei in 2017. Obviously, he added, in order to reach those results a very good programming of the production area is needed, a perfect planning of the maintenance works, so that they won't overlap as much as possible with the periods of flooding and the periods when the inner rivers' affluent flows are significant and electricity could be produced.
The record profit means a maximum attention to the spending and a good production planning that must go hand in hand with the trading and sales department. We must sell and we must do it at prices as good as possible, because we operate in a competitive market and compete with both the energy producers and the market traders. This market is more dynamic than they are in other areas.
Should we wish for a clean energy, we must make sacrifices in this respect, said Badea. And then I know that any change of price is reflected in the industry and in each others' pocket and one must see in what measure each of us is wiling to pay some extra money for this desideratum.
The energy market in Romania is pretty mature, we are enough advanced as compared to other markets and I believe we are quite prepared as regards the European exigencies regarding the energy trading. It remains the matter when the market will get opened and the way each and every one will understand to position themselves, once we will operate in a regional market.
Naturally, not everyone sees with good eyes Hidroelectrica's performances. And then a lot of speculation could occur. Perhaps there are groups that consider that Hidroelectrica should return to what it was before insolvency, when it sold energy that it had not, for privileged prices, was making investment with no economic sense, only to spend the money, the maintenance where it was not needed and so on.
I have learned enough things of all that has happened before insolvency, I have also watched the long restructuring process that was necessary subsequently to insolvency and we don't want to find ourselves again in such situations.
The "sly guys" are still lurking and as you probably see, heavy battles are still underway on all fronts with these "sly guys". Do not believe they have vanished, they are still out there and will try permanently to return to the privileges they used to have in the past. I'm happy that on 12 November the Romanian state has recorded a huge victory in its fight with these "sly guys" (the Swiss-based energy trader Alpiq has lost law suit to the Romanian state at World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington for the annulment of its contract with Hidroelectrica, in 2012), and this is a positive signal. It is the duty of each of us to make things from the past never happen again.
