Minister for Energy Constantin Nita: Operations on OPCOM will increase greatly due to market liberalization from January 1st

Operations on OPCOM will increase greatly in the following period, due to market liberalization from January 1^st 2014, Minister for Energy Constantin Nita stated on Thursday in an energy conference. “Energy market liberalization has been in the past 20 years a main topic of discussion. The reality shows that we need to fit into the market. The market is the one that regulates all these issues. Price is regulated by the market. Unfortunately, we’ve started this liberalization process a little late and as it goes on it creates more problems. We now see how efficiently we work, we now see how the companies producing electricity have operated and are operating. Their efficiency determines the market price. We have the OPCOM exchange, which works very well. This year it increased somewhere around EUR 600mln and I believe it will continue to grow. Operations on the exchange will increase greatly in the following period. That’s due to liberalization from January 1^st 2014”, Nita said. According to him, energy market liberalization process has shown that prices drop on the exchange.