Romania’s demand-flexibility market has entered into force with a crisis-only constraint, while the country’s demand-response mechanism took effect on 26 August. The final regulation is narrower than the market description previously outlined by energy regulator ANRE. ANRE’s 19 August announcement had presented demand flexibility as a voluntary market instrument for eligible consumers, suppliers and aggregators to offer reductions in electricity consumption to Transelectrica.
In that earlier description, ANRE said the service was not reserved exclusively for crisis situations. It was framed as an economic mechanism allowing consumers to decide when reducing consumption would be more valuable than continuing to use electricity. Under the later framework, activation is tied to defined crisis conditions affecting national electricity system operation.
Crisis conditions for activating the demand-response mechanism
Order 54/2026, published in Romania’s Official Gazette on 26 August, sets out when the mechanism can be activated. It applies in national shortages threatening system adequacy, regional or European supply crises, extended extreme weather, and prolonged outages of interconnectors or internal transmission lines that constrain imports. The order also covers other emergency situations identified by the national dispatcher.
The activation trigger is linked to performance across market segments. Transelectrica is required to assess whether activation is needed after reviewing day-ahead and balancing markets over the previous five completed working days. The trigger includes cases where selling offers have systematically failed to provide sufficient adequacy relative to electricity demand in individual trading intervals.
Auction design, trading interval and minimum offer size
Once activated, the mechanism uses daily auctions for selected working-day intervals. Consumption flexibility is traded in 15-minute periods, matching Romania’s imbalance-settlement interval. The minimum quantity that may be offered is 0.5 MW.
Eligible providers include dispatchable consumers, electricity suppliers and aggregators participating in the day-ahead market. End-users must have remotely readable meters to participate, while customers already qualified and participating as balancing-service providers are excluded from simultaneously supplying the new service. Transelectrica will publish its required reduction volume two days ahead of delivery.
Provider eligibility, baselines and limits on operation
Offers are ranked by price and accepted until the required reduction volume has been covered. The mechanism can operate only for the period considered strictly necessary and for no more than one month without a new assessment. This structure affects how potential aggregators plan participation and investment.
The rules include a baseline for measuring delivered flexibility. Transelectrica and metering operators compare actual consumption against reference consumption based on previous operating periods. For aggregators, aligning that baseline is described as essential because demand response value depends on distinguishing genuine load reduction from consumption that would not have occurred otherwise.
Activation frequency and implications for aggregation models
The frequency of activation is identified as a key factor for aggregator economics. An aggregator investing, for example, €1 million in industrial controls, metering interfaces, forecasting software and customer contracts needs enough market events to recover those costs. If activations occur during ordinary high-price and tight-system periods, it could support a commercial flexibility industry.
If activation is limited to exceptional adequacy or emergency events, expected annual revenues become harder to predict. The same constraint also affects industrial consumers differently depending on scale and flexibility needs. A large energy-intensive factory may curtail production if compensation exceeds its lost operating margin without requiring dozens of activations per year.
Voluntary offers versus traded load reductions
Participation remains voluntary under the mechanism rules. Eligible consumers specify both the amount they are prepared to reduce and the price required, and accepted offers become firm transactions verified against metering data. This approach treats load shedding as a traded product rather than an administrative instruction.
The wording of the final rule indicates Romania has not created a continuously functioning flexibility exchange. For Southeast European power markets, the unresolved question highlighted in the framework is whether flexible demand should compete every day with generation or remain a strategic instrument activated only when conventional markets are under stress . Romania has now built the auction machinery . What remains uncertain is how often it will be allowed to run.
