Romanians spent, on average, close to seven hours without electricity last year due to power outages or works on the power network. This compares to a maximum of 2.5 hours in Western countries, according to the yearly performance report released by the Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority or ANRE, as spotted by Business24.
At a national level, power outages totaled 407.73 minutes per user in 2018, a number which includes both scheduled and unscheduled electricity cuts. Fact is, the 224.14 minutes of unscheduled power outages account for more than half of the total average per user (54.97%), and the remaining 183.58 minutes were likely scheduled for maintenance works.
Of the eight energy companies included in the chart below, Delgaz Grid is the “overall leader” in terms of power outage, with 593.84 minutes per user in 2018. The winning spot goes to E-Distributie Muntenia, with only 184.61 minutes per user last year. However, that’s much higher than the 20–100 minutes per year in Western countries’ System Average Interruption Duration Index or SAIDI, as mentioned for comparison in the report.
The report highlights a minor improvement of the power networks, in which one of the key metrics is the SAIDI: scheduled SAIDI has dropped from 193 minutes recorded in 2017 to 184 minutes per year on average per user in 2018, of which unplanned SAIDI has seen a 60-minute improvement compared to the previous year, dropping from 284 minutes per year to 224 minute per year.
Romania has a total of 9,448,823 electricity users, of which 5,170,629 are based in urban areas and 4,278,194 in rural areas. The Delgaz Grid has a 15.55% market share (1.46 million users), followed closely by Distributie Energie Oltenia (1.43 million users) which secures the company a 15.22% share of the market.
Title image: Pixabay.com
