Romania’s rapidly expanding renewable energy sector is creating major opportunities for flexibility and virtual power plant technologies, according to Jan Hicl, co-founder of Delta Green, who says the country could become one of the company’s most important growth markets in the region.
Speaking to The Diplomat-Bucharest, Hicl explained that balancing electricity grids is becoming increasingly difficult as solar and other renewable sources expand across Europe.
“The grid needs to stay in equilibrium between consumption and production,” Hicl said. “With renewables, the challenge is that production depends on weather conditions. If forecasts predict clouds and the sun suddenly appears, much more energy is generated than expected.”
Delta Green’s solution is to aggregate household devices such as batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and air conditioning systems into a virtual power plant capable of responding to grid needs in real time.
“We decided that the people who get paid for helping stabilize the grid could also be households,” Hicl said. “In moments of excess solar production, homes could start heating water, charging EVs or cooling the house. We aggregate hundreds of households and present them to the grid operator as one large flexible resource.”
“We started building the system for ourselves first, and then realized it could work for other people as well,” he added.
Delta Green currently works with several energy retailers in the Czech Republic, including E.ON, and says six out of the country’s ten largest retailers now use its platform. In Romania, the company has already launched cooperation with Premier Energy and is in discussions with other major market players.
“One goal we would like to achieve by the end of this year is to have the first production rollout with Premier Energy,” Hicl said. “By the end of next year, I hope we will have tens of thousands of households connected to the platform.”
Hicl described Romania as a market with “huge potential” because of the rapid expansion of residential solar installations and the high balancing costs currently paid across the energy system.
He believes the flexibility market remains one of the biggest untapped opportunities in Europe’s energy transition.
“We are adding renewables very quickly, which is positive, but it comes with challenges,” Hicl said. Sometimes there is so much renewable energy that prices even become negative because nobody is consuming it.”
Hicl also noted that Romania’s fast-growing photovoltaic market creates favorable conditions for flexibility services.
“In the Czech Republic, there are around 200,000 photovoltaic systems connected today. In Romania, the latest numbers I saw were around 500,000 systems,” he said. “That is a massive opportunity.”
Despite the market potential, Hicl acknowledged that one of the biggest obstacles remains the conservative nature of the energy industry itself.
“The energy sector is not traditionally an innovative sector,” he said. “Utilities have been selling electricity the same way for decades — you consume energy and receive a bill. Now we are introducing services that actively control devices inside households, and that changes the entire conversation with customers.”
He concluded that building trust and educating consumers will be critical for the adoption of virtual power plant technologies in Romania.