Less than 10% of PV customers have electricity storage units, and the reason for this low percentage is the high cost of this technology, said Răzvan Ilie, Area Sales Manager at Volt.

“Less than 10% of beneficiaries also have energy storage capacity, due to high costs. They are starting to be encouraged by funding programmes to install storage units,” said Ilie, at the conference “Energy Efficiency for Energy Transition” organised in București by Energynomics together with the Romanian Energy Efficiency Fund – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy.

According to Ilie, investing in a residential PV system pays for itself in a fairly short period of four or five years, but there are a number of risk factors.

One is the high cost of the initial investment if connection costs increase, and the second is the frequent and unexpected changes in the funding guidelines of grant programmes.

A third risk factor is associated with a lack of technical education, both on the part of beneficiaries and installers.

DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION OF RĂZVAN ILIE

“Unfortunately, the authorities do not give us a well-defined timeframe for implementation. We see a gap on the education side on the part of implementers and beneficiaries. Full information is needed so that beneficiaries can carefully choose contractors and avoid mistakes in design and execution that can cause quite big damages,” Ilie added.

The conference in Buvharest was the last of a series of 5 scheduled by the Energynomics communication platform, the Romanian Fund for Energy Efficiency – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy. The project was financed by Norwegian Grants 2014-2021.