IN Brief:
- ANRE Order 54/2026 establishes procurement for dispatchable demand flexibility in Romania's electricity system.
- Transelectrica can procure verified voluntary load reductions from eligible consumers, suppliers, and aggregators.
- The mechanism adds controllable electricity demand to the system operator's available flexibility resources.
Romania’s National Energy Regulatory Authority has brought a regulated mechanism for dispatchable demand flexibility into force, allowing eligible electricity users to receive payment for voluntary reductions in consumption.
ANRE approved the regulation on 19 August, with Order 54/2026 published in Romania’s Official Gazette on 26 August. The mechanism creates a formal system service through which controllable demand can be procured alongside resources traditionally supplied from the generation side of the electricity market.
Transelectrica establishes the flexibility requirement and organises procurement for periods when load reduction is required. Eligible consumers can participate directly or through suppliers and aggregators, submitting the quantity of demand they are prepared to reduce and the price sought for that response.
Offers are selected competitively, and delivery is assessed using metering data against the consumption profile established by the regulation. Participants that provide the contracted reduction are remunerated under the market mechanism.
Demand becomes a dispatchable resource
The arrangement gives the system operator another way to manage an imbalance without relying exclusively on additional generation. A temporary reduction in load can provide an equivalent short-term change in system balance where the participating consumer can alter consumption without unacceptable disruption to its operation.
ANRE has described participation as voluntary and has said the mechanism is not a general rationing arrangement. Consumers decide whether to participate according to their technical capabilities, operating requirements, and the price available for reducing demand.
The practical pool is therefore likely to be concentrated among loads with genuine flexibility. Pumping systems, refrigeration, compressed air, industrial heating, charging installations, thermal storage, and some data centre infrastructure can all contain controllable demand, although the usable response depends on the individual site and process.
An industrial plant cannot simply switch off every large electrical load without consequences. Production schedules, product quality, restart procedures, equipment limits, worker safety, and downstream operations all determine how much demand can be interrupted and for how long.
The bid price provides a commercial mechanism for expressing some of those constraints. A site with low-cost flexibility can offer a lower price, while an operation where curtailment disrupts production will require greater compensation or may decline to participate altogether.
Aggregators can extend the model to customers that are individually too small to offer a useful block of capacity. Combining multiple sites can produce a dispatchable portfolio, provided their metering, communications, baseline calculation, and response can be coordinated reliably enough to satisfy Transelectrica’s requirements.
Measurement is central to the arrangement because the system operator is buying a reduction rather than a directly metered generator output. The counterfactual question is unavoidable: how much electricity would the consumer have used if it had not been instructed to reduce demand?
The consumption baseline provides that reference. If the methodology overstates normal demand, participants can appear to deliver flexibility that did not exist; if it understates demand, a genuine response can be under-rewarded. Baseline design therefore becomes part of the engineering and settlement system rather than a minor administrative detail.
Communications and control also matter where flexibility is expected to behave as a system service. Dispatch instructions must reach participants quickly, response has to occur within the required interval, metering must capture the change, and data systems need to demonstrate afterwards that the contracted service was delivered.
Those requirements favour greater digitalisation of large electricity loads. Plant control systems, energy-management platforms, interval metering, and aggregator software can turn demand that was once treated as fixed into something that can be scheduled and verified.
The new service sits alongside batteries, generation, interconnection, and other flexibility options rather than replacing them. Each has different duration, response time, location, cost, and availability characteristics, and the least-cost system response can change from one operating period to another.
Demand reduction has one useful characteristic: it can avoid producing or importing an additional megawatt at the exact moment when the system is short. Its limitation is that curtailed consumption normally has an operational consequence and may later rebound if the underlying process still has to be completed.
The regulation consequently turns a previously implicit source of flexibility into a priced service with defined procurement and verification. Its eventual scale will depend on how many Romanian consumers qualify, how much controllable load they can offer, and whether the payments available are sufficient to justify changing industrial and commercial operating schedules.
Order 54/2026 provides the legal mechanism. The more revealing figures will emerge once Transelectrica begins procuring the service: available megawatts, accepted bid prices, response reliability, and the extent to which flexible demand competes with more conventional balancing resources.
