Romania’s energy regulator ANRE has published a third version of proposed rules intended to make electricity sharing, supply, balancing and billing work in practice. The consultation runs until Oct. 16. The draft focuses on how energy communities handle procurement and supplier responsibilities as they redesign their commercial structures.
The largest change concerns the separation between a residual supplier and a single supplier. Under the residual model, members receive part of their electricity through the energy community and buy only the remaining volume required from the grid from their chosen supplier. The alternative is a single-supplier structure that covers the member’s entire electricity demand.
The proposal also allows an energy community to become its own supplier if it obtains the required electricity-supply licence. This would move the Romanian energy-community model beyond shared generation. It also creates a retail-market dynamic in which community operators, established suppliers and specialist energy-service companies compete over procurement, balancing, billing and relationships with individual members.
Supplier roles and procurement needs for shared generation
Energy communities that include households, municipal buildings or small businesses are unlikely to match generation and consumption exactly in every settlement period. Generation can exceed demand at times, while members may require substantial electricity from the wider market at other times. Managing this difference creates a continuing procurement requirement.
In the residual-supplier model, the community can retain control of internally produced electricity while an external retailer fills the gap. This is designed to allow existing electricity suppliers to participate without taking over the entire community structure. The single-supplier model instead allows one company to manage both community electricity and external procurement, bundling shared generation, market purchases, balancing and customer billing into one product.
The draft notes that large retailers could benefit because they already have electricity-procurement systems, balancing capabilities and billing infrastructure. It also indicates potential room for other competitors under a single-supplier approach. With sufficient scale, an energy community could obtain a supply licence and operate as its own retail-energy company.
Potential services and operational requirements
The draft links the expanded role of communities to additional services beyond renewable generation ownership. It cites demand response, storage optimisation, dynamic tariffs and aggregation as possible offerings. It also describes how a community with several hundred customers and granular consumption data could manage electricity as a portfolio.
In that portfolio approach, solar electricity could be allocated first to participating members. Storage could absorb part of surplus generation, while flexible loads could be shifted toward periods of higher community production. Only the remaining requirement would need to be purchased from the market.
The supplier role is described as increasingly sophisticated under both models. The supplier must forecast consumption and community generation, manage imbalances and determine how much electricity must be sourced externally. The draft states that better forecasting and optimisation would reduce exposure to potentially expensive market purchases.
The proposed structure also implies new roles for software providers alongside conventional utilities. Community-management platforms would need to coordinate metering data, allocation algorithms, contracts, settlement and billing across multiple customers. Romania’s distribution operators are identified as having a central function because they must determine and validate quantities of shared electricity allocated to individual consumption points.
Implementation timeline for shared-energy allocation
Under the timetable in the draft rules, distribution operators would have until Dec. 31, 2026 to implement IT functionality required for shared-energy allocation. The deadline is presented as an immediate bottleneck for digital infrastructure supporting accurate allocation of generation and consumption data across members for each settlement period.
The emerging model is described as creating a service chain involving distribution operators, electricity retailers, community managers, software providers, aggregators and balancing-responsible parties. It may also affect how municipalities develop local renewable projects by shifting focus from electricity production alone to broader community-based supply arrangements covering public and private customers.
The consultation remains open on the third version of ANRE’s proposed rules, with final requirements potentially changing before adoption. The draft’s direction is described as moving Romania’s energy communities away from dividing locally generated electricity toward enabling direct participation in the competitive retail market. It also frames future competition as extending beyond building community solar toward controlling customer relationships, managing balancing risk and supplying volumes not produced by the community itself.