At the forefront of Romania’s digital energy transformation, Corneliu Bodea, CEO of Adrem and President of the Romanian Energy Center, describes how the company has evolved from a traditional EPC contractor into an integrator of intelligent infrastructure. In this conversation, he outlines Adrem’s shift toward automation, analytics, and flexibility — where batteries, sensors, and software work together to balance networks in real time. Speaking candidly about regulation, insurance, and risk in the fast-emerging BESS sector, Bodea calls for a mindset change: from building assets to building intelligence around them, from permission to enablement, and from static infrastructure to adaptive, data-driven systems.
Adrem has positioned itself as a leader in automation, energy infrastructure, and smart systems integration. What recent projects best capture this transition from traditional EPC work to digitalized, data-driven energy management?
We’ve stopped thinking about EPC as the “end of the project.” The real value now lies in how that infrastructure performs over time — how it responds, adapts, and learns.
Our most interesting work is where automation, sensors, and analytics become part of the DNA of the installation itself. For example, we’ve built control and monitoring systems that not only operate networks, but also anticipate congestions, detect imbalances, and recommend dispatch strategies.
We`re trying to morph transition from building assets to building intelligence around those assets.
As grid congestion and balancing needs grow in Romania, how is Adrem contributing to projects that integrate renewable assets with storage, smart metering, and grid optimization tools?
Adrem is involved in hybridization projects where storage is no longer an accessory but a structural component of the grid. The next generation of networks will not just transport energy — they’ll negotiate it.
Our teams design control architectures where PV, BESS, and flexible loads talk to each other, share local balancing functions, and even take part in frequency response.
At the same time, our metering and SCADA work feeds the data needed to make this coordination real. The future grid won’t need to be larger, but more intelligent per unit of capacity — optimized through data, automation, and distributed flexibility.
You have long advocated for innovation in Romania’s energy ecosystem. From your perspective, what regulatory or technological shifts are now most urgent to ensure that industrial players can support decarbonization and maintain competitiveness?
We need to move from “permission” to enablement. Regulation still looks at storage, flexibility, and distributed generation through the old lens of generation–transmission–consumption. That model is obsolete.
What we need now is a framework where flexibility has a price, where grid operators can procure balancing locally, and where investors know how to monetize storage.
Technology is already there; it’s regulation that must catch up. And this requires courage — to simplify, to standardize, and to trust that the market can handle complexity if you let it.
How aware are local developers and EPCs of the specific technical and operational risks associated with BESS projects during the early design and construction stages?
Awareness is growing, but understanding is still shallow. Everyone knows “batteries can catch fire,” but few understand why — or how to prevent cascading failures through design and controls.
Thermal management, harmonics, EMC, grounding, and especially software security are often underestimated.
The lesson we try to share with clients is simple: BESS projects are control systems with hardware attached, not the other way around. Those who grasp this early avoid most of the later headaches.
How do project stakeholders currently address insurance as a prerequisite for bankability, and what are the main gaps in understanding between developers, financiers, and insurers?
Insurance is treated too often as paperwork, not as engineering. Developers rely on generic policies; insurers lack technical data to price risk; banks tick the box and move on.
But batteries are not photovoltaic modules — they breathe, age, and react to their environment. A credible risk assessment must link operational strategy (DoD, C-rate, temperature) to financial exposure.
Until the three parties — engineers, financiers, insurers — speak the same technical language, we’ll continue to see mismatched expectations and overpriced premiums.
What challenges have you seen when applying traditional insurance products to battery energy storage projects, and how could these be better aligned with real project risks?
Traditional products were designed for static assets — steel, concrete, transformers. Batteries are chemical and dynamic. The main challenge is that most policies exclude exactly what can happen: design defects, degradation, and thermal propagation.
We need underwriters who understand system engineering, not just actuarial tables.
A better model would tie insurance conditions to verified control quality: certified testing (UL 9540A, IEC 62933), cybersecurity audits, and emergency response readiness. Reward those who build safely, not just those who fill forms.
How do co-located PV + BESS projects reshape insurance needs, and to what extent are Romanian companies ready to assess and model this new risk profile?
Co-location changes everything. The risk is no longer “two assets side by side,” but a shared ecosystem — one EMS, one interconnection point, one operational logic.
Losses and failures propagate faster and wider. That means insurance must evolve from asset coverage to system coverage.
Romanian developers are learning quickly, but we still lack standardized methods for modeling the combined behavior of PV + BESS. This will become the next maturity test for our market.
What is the key on-site and integration risks developers should anticipate when deploying BESS alongside generation assets?
Integration is where most projects fail — not in chemistry, but in interfaces.
Electrical selectivity, protection coordination, fire safety, and the clear segregation between IT and OT systems — these are not “extras,” they’re survival mechanisms.
The smarter the system, the smaller the margin for error. That’s why our approach is to design operational resilience first, and performance second. A well-built system must continue to behave safely even when something — or someone — goes wrong.
