Apartment centrals are to be banned in the EU, according to a European directive adopted by the European Parliament. From next year, the state will no longer be able to subsidize their installation, and starting from 2030, all new buildings should have zero emissions.
According to Laurențiu Urluescu, the president of the Romanian Energy Suppliers Association (AFEER), it is important to adapt our legislation to European requirements, but he believes that the directive will not be put into practice urgently.
Apartment centrals, banned by the European Parliament
According to him, people should remain calm at present. No one intends to confiscate their power plants from their homes and no one forbids them to use them.
The restriction of the installation of new gas plants could intervene only after the adaptation of the legislation. So this is a distant prospect, possibly around 2037-2038.
In any case, the long-term solution involves the transition from apartment plants to power plants or even more advanced solutions such as heat pumps, but these are long-term issues, not immediate.
“My view is that the current gas plants will naturally go out of operation by the deadline, i.e. by 2040. When such a gas plant goes out of service, citizens will survey the market and see that there are other much more cost-effective heating solutions and they will opt for them.
Thus, these gas plants disappear naturally. But this will take years, we still have a long, long way to go until then”, said Laurenţiu Urluescu.
The directive will be implemented until 2040
Dumitru Chisăliță, president of the Intelligent Energy Association, said that the directive on apartment plants cannot be put into practice in Romania until 2040-2050, when it is estimated that gas resources will be limited.
There are no regulations that compel someone to replace a gas plant at present.
At the same time, it is known that both at the European level and in some cities in Romania, local councils have adopted energy policies that prohibit the installation of these plants in new buildings. An example is Cluj.
“Cluj has such a policy, for everything that means new blocks, there it is not allowed to install an apartment switchboard inside the apartment, but only a block switchboard or a staircase switchboard. And for now we are talking about a directive, and not a regulation.
This allows member countries to adopt individual policies in the field.
Romania is one of the few European countries that regulates its energy balance with the help of gases. And that for the simple reason that we have resources. Other countries don’t have gas and rely on other energy resources, and here it’s the other way around,” said Dumitru Chisăliță.
Apartments. Photo source: Vlad Ispas | Dreamstime.com
The energy expert detailed the reasons why a decision to remove gas-fired apartment boilers and replace them with electricity-powered ones is currently difficult to achieve.
“I don’t see how millions of homes could be switched to “electric” when that means a consumption of at least 14-15 kW/h, even 30 kW/h in larger homes, and now the consumption per household is 1 or 2 kW/h“, he said for Adevărul.
Central apartment units, numbering three million in Romania
In recent years, in Romania, there has been a significant increase in the number of homes that have disconnected from the public heating networks and opted for apartment central heating systems.
Qwhile, in the 2000s, only 410,000 homes in Romania were equipped with heating plants, most of the apartments being connected to the centralized system.
In 2011, at the national level, there were approximately 1.76 million homes that were heated with apartment central heating units, reaching in 2016 to over 2.2 million, and in 2022 – to approximately three million apartment heating central units.
