Timisoara, a major city in western Romania, was left without public heating on Oct. 26. Approximately 56,000 families were left without heating as temperatures dropped near freezing. The German gas supplier, E.ON Romania, stopped the distribution of gas to Colterm, the city-owned heating company which is based on lignite and needs a gas support-fire. Colterm was declared to be insolvent on Tuesday and owes 15.3 million Euros to E.ON. In the past months the city had to negotiate gas contracts on a daily basis with payments in advance.
One of the causes of Colterm’s bankruptcy is the millions of Euros it had to pay since 2006 for its carbon emissions. Colterm didn’t buy all its carbon emission certificates for 2020 and received a fine of 21.6 million Euros.Hospitals and schools are impacted. The maternity ward of Timisoara had to regroup all babies in a room which is now electricity heated, whilst the mothers survive at 15 C. In hospitals, patients received an extra blanket. At the same time, Romania faces one of it’s worst moments of the COVID pandemic with more than 400 victims per day. The liberal coalition Government fell on the 5th of October.
Timisoara is only an alarm signal for a situation that could quickly become generalised. In the context of the high gas and carbon certificates prices, many Romanian cities face heating difficulties. “The additional costs are so high that, without government intervention, all these operators - we are 27 municipalities - risk going bankrupt,” said Lucian Vizite, mayor of the city of Bacău, cited by Hotnews.ro. The situation is already critical in the city of Deva which had its power plant shut down in the spring of this year. Bucharest, the capital, which has the biggest central heating network of Europe after Moscow, with 562,000 apartments depending on it, could be next as its heat distributor could enter insolvency.
