Romania's cheap hydro and nuclear power fails to lower consumer electricity bills

Dumitru Chisăliță, president of Asociația Energia Inteligentă, argues that Romania’s abundant low-cost hydroelectric and nuclear capacity does not translate into lower household electricity costs. He traces the issue to the 2000 reorganisation of CONEL, which separated generation by fuel type into independent, profit-driven firms. The European merit-order mechanism then sets the market price at the level of the last, often gas-fired, plant required to satisfy demand, forcing all producers—including cheap hydro and nuclear—to receive the same high tariff.

Consequently, expensive thermal generation lifts overall prices, and the fragmented system eliminates the benefits of an integrated national energy strategy. Chisăliță calls the reform’s biggest mistake the confusion of competition with fragmentation, which undermines the public interest after a quarter-century.