Are monthly meter indices enough for a battery study?

No. They give the energy per month but not when it was used, and in Romania the battery's value depends on the time of day: solar surplus and day-ahead prices. They are useful for checking a load curve, not for replacing it.

Can I work with hourly data?

For a first look, yes. Since the day-ahead market moved to 15-minute periods in October 2025, quarter-hour data matches the prices better, and hourly averages hide short peaks. Say which resolution was used.

What if the operator does not reply?

Ask the supplier, which receives the measurement data for settlement. If no interval data exists, a temporary logger can record a few weeks, but the year is then an estimate and the report must say so.

Do I need the invoices as well?

Yes. They are what the rebuilt bill is checked against, and they show the supplier's contract type — fixed or indexed to the day-ahead market — which decides whether arbitrage is possible at all.

Curba de sarcină: getting interval data for a Romanian business site

Who holds the data

The distribution operator measures the site and provides the measurement data for settlement within the first eight working days of the month, in the format set in the annex of the framework contract (ANRE Order 25/2021; framework contract, ANRE Order 90/2015).
The consumption history kept for a consumer must cover three years, including the meter indices and how they were obtained (ANRE Order 5/2023).
The four distribution operators, by the zones in the 2026 tariff notice: Rețele Electrice România (Banat, Dobrogea, Muntenia Sud), Distribuție Energie Electrică România (Muntenia Nord, Transilvania Sud and Nord), Distribuție Energie Oltenia and Delgaz Grid (Moldova). Zorowatt mapped the zones to the operators from identical tariff values (MET notice); check the operator on the site's invoice.

What could not be verified

The export formats of the four operators' portals, and whether a 15-minute load curve can be downloaded without a request.
How widely business sites have interval metering at all.
For households, the smart-meter rollout was about 10% (SolarPower Europe 2026). That says nothing certain about business sites, which is why the request below asks for the interval explicitly.

Why the time of use matters most in Romania

Romanian regulated network tariffs are charged per MWh, with no kW component (MET notice), so a battery has no peak charge to cut. Its value is in moving energy in time: storing midday solar and buying on the day-ahead market (PZU) when it is cheap. The PZU has traded in 15-minute periods since delivery day 1 October 2025 (OPCOM weekly report). Monthly indices give the energy but not the time, so they cannot size a battery. See Romanian business tariffs 2026: no kW charge.

Prosumers: ask for the export too

At 30 June 2026 Romania had 34,843 legal-entity prosumers with 1,952 MW, of which 3,853 had a battery (ANRE data via StartupCafe, 13 Aug 2026). For a site with panels, the injected energy per interval is as important as the consumption: it is the surplus a battery would store.

A written request

The place of consumption code (POD) and the address of the site.
The consumption curve (curba de sarcină) for the last 12 full months, at 15-minute resolution, or the finest resolution available.
For a prosumer: the injected energy for the same intervals, in a separate column.
The unit (kWh or kW), and whether the time stamps mark the start or the end of each interval.
The format: CSV or Excel, as exported, unchanged.
The invoices for the same months, so the curve can be checked against what was billed.

File traps to expect

Romanian diacritics in the headers saved in an older encoding (Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-2) rather than UTF-8; garbled ă, ș or ț are the sign.
Dates as dd.mm.yyyy and decimal commas.
Monthly index readings mixed with interval values; the indices are a register and have to be differenced, not summed.

Check the file in the free meter data checker before anything else: it runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

Frequently asked questions

Are monthly meter indices enough for a battery study?: No. They give the energy per month but not when it was used, and in Romania the battery's value depends on the time of day: solar surplus and day-ahead prices. They are useful for checking a load curve, not for replacing it.
Can I work with hourly data?: For a first look, yes. Since the day-ahead market moved to 15-minute periods in October 2025, quarter-hour data matches the prices better, and hourly averages hide short peaks. Say which resolution was used.
What if the operator does not reply?: Ask the supplier, which receives the measurement data for settlement. If no interval data exists, a temporary logger can record a few weeks, but the year is then an estimate and the report must say so.
Do I need the invoices as well?: Yes. They are what the rebuilt bill is checked against, and they show the supplier's contract type — fixed or indexed to the day-ahead market — which decides whether arbitrage is possible at all.

Related guides

Sources

Last checked: 2026-10-30. Every figure in this guide comes from the source linked next to it, with the retrieval date Zorowatt's research recorded (28–30 October 2026), or from arithmetic shown step by step.

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