Romanian gas operator Delgaz Grid, owned by E.ON and covering 40% of the country’s distribution network, announced it has signed its first contract to deploy a unique pressure management solution at its gas station in Reșița. The project will be carried out by the British company Utonomy, after it won the gas company’s public tender in October last year.
The UtonomyOne pressure management platform (link to the news: „Smart pressure management solutions“), which we wrote about in an earlier publication, combines local retrofit hardware, secure wireless connectivity and cloud software services for centralized control, monitoring and process automation. The solution’s focus is to replace manual, static settings of regulator stations with autonomous and remotely controllable control so that network pressure more closely matches current demand.
At the gas distribution station in Reșița, the investor will use the newly launched SB750 actuator, which will be installed as a retrofit module on existing Totalgaz Industrie pressure regulators. The installation includes mechanical mounting of the actuator, configuring the mathematical model for the specific valve and setting mechanical stops in safe positions. After commissioning, Ucontrol can operate autonomously according to a local setpoint schedule, or be connected to the cloud for remote control and monitoring. The Reșița project will be carried out in stages, starting with remote control of set pressure values via Ucontrol and Uconnect, before installing the new smart gas network product Upredict, which uses machine learning to optimize network pressure and minimize leaks, with documented methane emissions reductions to date of up to 25%.
The German E.ON group’s project in Romania comes in response to the new EU Regulations on limiting methane emissions in the energy sector, which were formally adopted in May 2024, entered into force the following August, and therefore operators are seeking ways to efficiently modernize their networks, many of which face the challenges of aging infrastructure.
Which companies are behind the project implementation in Romania?
Founded in 2015, Utonomy is a UK-based company that uses patented hardware and machine learning technologies to optimize pressure in the gas network. Its primary goals are to reduce methane emissions from the network, maximize the injection of biomethane into the network, and support the network’s transition to low‑carbon forms of gas. Utonomy is also an official partner of Dresser Utility Solutions in the UK.
Delgaz Grid Delgaz Grid, a subsidiary of the German E.ON group, has a gas distribution network covering approximately 27,000 km across about 20 counties in the north and west of Romania and an electricity distribution network of over 82,700 km in six counties in the Moldova region, serving more than 3.6 million customers. Since entering the local market in 2005, E.ON has invested €2.7 billion, mainly in modernizing gas and electricity distribution networks.
We at Gasterm are in a partnership with the British company Utonomy and, if there is interest from Bulgarian clients, remain available for more information and contact.
