One of the challenges Alba Iulia (and all the cities in Romania/Europe) is confronting with is the excess of local produced energy from solar panels. The ascension of green energy for private houses is surging tremendously in the last years. If in 2019 there were only 303 prosumers at National level, in 2022 30.000 houses managed to implement solar panels, with the help of gov. funds and became prosumers. Moreover, in 2024 the number of „green houses” passed through 110.000. The biggest challenge having so much green energy produced is the poorly managed state of the National grid.
Even if a house is a prosumer, at the peak of the production (and not only at the peak), the national energy providers refuse to put the green energy into the grid, resorting on the well-known already motivation that the grid is overloaded and incapable to transport all the energy. Therefore, at Alba Iulia city level, as well as in all the cities in Romania, a great quantity of energy is vanishing because of the lack of implementation of the concept related to „energy communities”. A very relevant example would be this: 10 houses commit themselves to provide green energy to a hospital nearby, in order to help the institution to downgrade their energy costs. At the moment, this is not possible because of legislation and other shady regulations. Facing the challenge of creating energy communities and succeeding with the help of EU experts will be a great opportunity to learn how to use the excessive wasted green energy in a scope managed by the municipality/county council. Solving this problem has the potential to become a very important step towards a simpler
way to create PEBs and PEDs, to reduce the energy poverty (areas already mapped by Alba Iulia Municipality), and to create a system of sustainable and continuous energy trading within the energy communities.
