Moldova has declared a state of emergency in energy and hydrology. The Chișinău heating plant is seeking an 83 percent increase in heat prices, while Energocom reported an evening deficit

On Tuesday, the Moldovan parliament approved a state of emergency in energy and hydrology for 60 days from 26 September. The vote came after five hours of questions and was supported by 54 deputies from the ruling PAS party. On the same day, the Chișinău heating company Termoelectrica requested an 82.6 percent increase in the price of a gigacalorie, and the operator Energocom announced that there would be a shortage of electricity in the grid in the evening. UNIMEDIA ↗ On Wednesday, a third request was added: Energocom proposed that the regulator raise household gas prices by 29.3 percent. BANI.md ↗ On Thursday, a security dimension was added to the energy crisis. Four drones flew over the north of the country, and the chair of the parliamentary security committee publicly said he hoped that the target of the Russian attack had not been the Ukrainian hydroelectric power plant on the Dniester. Newsmaker ↗ On Thursday evening, the request to raise gas prices became a political dispute: former infrastructure minister Andrei Spînu challenged it with a table according to which exchange prices were three times lower than in 2022. Meanwhile, the government announced that it was also looking for gas across the Atlantic.

What the state of emergency means

The measure is in force for 60 days from 26 September and was prepared by the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of the Environment and the National Crisis Management Centre. It is intended to allow the government to respond more quickly to disruptions in energy, fuel and water supplies. It is based on a report on the crisis situation in the energy and hydrological sectors. Cotidianul ↗

Prime Minister Vasile Tofan defended it in plenary by saying that the risks ahead of winter had not diminished but were overlapping. “Preparation for a crisis does not begin when the lights go out, the pump stops or diesel disappears from the filling station,” he told deputies. Energy minister Dorin Junghietu clarified on Wednesday how close Moldova was to that point: diesel reserves would last approximately nine days, and petrol reserves 26 to 28 days. Diesel consumption is 2 000 to 2 500 tonnes a day, or almost three million litres. During the state of emergency, the government adjusted margins and the formulas used to calculate them in order to speed up supplies. BANI.md ↗ Meanwhile, prices at filling stations continued to rise. For Friday, the regulator ANRE set a maximum of 34.19 lei per litre of petrol and 36.81 lei per litre of diesel, new records. BANI.md ↗ UNIMEDIA ↗

Why: a reservoir at a historic low and gas at twice the price

The hydrological part of the crisis rests on one figure. The level of the Dniester reservoir fell to a historic low, threatening both hydroelectric power generation and water supplies. According to Ziarul de Gardă, Chișinău and Kyiv agreed on Wednesday that Ukraine would reduce the Dniester’s flow towards Moldova even further. Ziarul de Gardă ↗ The energy component is a matter of prices: gas on European markets exceeded 83 euros per megawatt-hour, and diesel 1 500 dollars per tonne. Cotidianul ↗

Another risk emerged on Thursday morning. During the Russian attack on Ukraine, four drones flew over northern Moldova, according to the Ministry of Defence; the authorities temporarily closed the airspace in the north of the country, and explosions were recorded in two places, near the village of Cernița and in Camenca on the left bank of the Dniester, which Chișinău does not control. Near Cernița in Florești district, police found a drone containing components of the Russian-made Gerbera type, the first such discovery in the country. No casualties were reported. Ziarul de Gardă ↗ Lilian Carp, chair of the parliamentary security committee and a member of the ruling PAS, linked the overflights to Russia intensifying its attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter. “We hope that the Dniester hydroelectric power plant was not the target tonight, because that poses an enormous risk to Moldova,” he said. Newsmaker ↗ This Ukrainian power plant stands on the same Dniester reservoir whose level is at a historic low. President Maia Sandu condemned the attack, saying that Russia’s war threatens all of Europe. Ziarul de Gardă ↗

Public broadcaster Moldova 1 aired a report on Thursday about the four drones detected over the districts of Briceni, Soroca, Florești and Camenca, including testimony from residents of Cernița who heard the explosion. The commentary is in Romanian.

Another discovery was made on Thursday afternoon. Fragments of a drone were found in Briceni district in the north of the country, near the Ukrainian border, and the site was sealed off. It was the same area over which the aircraft had flown that morning. Ziarul de Gardă ↗ A review by Ziarul de Gardă shows how much the country’s airspace has changed: violations were eleven times more frequent in 2026 than in 2022. Ziarul de Gardă ↗



According to President Maia Sandu, Moldova has no domestic oil or gas reserves and is entirely dependent on imports; she said the benchmark gas price on the European market had risen two and a half times compared with last year. UNIMEDIA ↗

Read also: Chișinău faces a drinking-water shortage as the Dniester level falls close to a historic low

Heat prices are set to rise by 83 percent

Termoelectrica is seeking to raise the price of a gigacalorie from 2 020 to 3 689 lei, or from approximately 100 to 183 euros at an exchange rate of around 20.1 lei to the euro. It cites the price of gas as the reason: for October to December, it is calculating an average price of 21 212 lei per thousand cubic metres, compared with 14 114 lei from April to September. BANI.md ↗

The second request was submitted by CET-Nord, which supplies the northern city of Bălți and wants to raise its tariff from 2 201 to 4 314 lei, or by approximately 96 percent. The regulator ANRE published both requests and will decide on them, so the approved amounts may differ from those requested. Ziarul de Gardă ↗

The household gas price for October has not yet been approved, but the request is already on the table. On Wednesday, Energocom submitted a proposal to ANRE to raise the regulated household price from 20.30 to 26.24 lei excluding VAT, an increase of 29.3 percent. It justified the move by saying that the tariffs valid from August to December had been based on a purchase price of around 56.25 euros per megawatt-hour, while the TTF benchmark exchange price had meanwhile exceeded 75 euros. According to the company, prices on the European market had risen by 42 percent since its previous request of 15 July. ANRE will decide on the proposal and may also amend it. BANI.md ↗ Newsmaker ↗ Energy minister Junghietu had previously promised to announce the final figure on 30 September. BANI.md ↗ ANRE director Alexei Taran suggested on Thursday that the issue would not end with heat. Heating plants also generate electricity purchased by Energocom, so more expensive gas would probably, in his view, be reflected in electricity prices as well. BANI.md ↗ Parliament speaker Igor Grosu said that the current tariff adjustment would not be the last and added that the compensation system for vulnerable households was to be expanded. BANI.md ↗

On Thursday evening, this request became a political dispute. Former infrastructure and energy minister Andrei Spînu, now in opposition, rejected the justification invoking an “unprecedented period” and published a table according to which the average exchange price of gas in 2022 was around 1 402 euros per thousand cubic metres, while from January to August 2026 it was 448 euros. He compared September itself in a similar way: 2 486 euros in 2022 against approximately 815 euros now. “Do not talk about an unprecedented period. Prices are now three times lower than in 2022,” he wrote. ANRE will decide on the request, and neither Energocom nor the government directly responded to his criticism. Newsmaker ↗

Electricity was already in short supply in the evening

While parliament was debating, Energocom announced that it would not cover the evening peak in commercial operations. It broke down the deficit by hour: 4 MWh between 5 and 6 p.m., 59 MWh an hour later, 111 MWh between 7 and 8 p.m. and 55 MWh by 9 p.m. In total, 229 megawatt-hours over four hours. BANI.md ↗

According to the company, the cause was not a breakdown but insufficient intraday capacity allocated on the Ukraine–Moldova and Romania–Moldova interconnections to cover demand. Energocom urged residents to save electricity, especially between 6 and 11 p.m. Wednesday showed how costly that dependence can be. The average daily price on the Bucharest day-ahead market for delivery on 24 September reached approximately 233 euros per megawatt-hour — the second highest in Europe, just behind Hungary at 239 euros. According to Moldova’s Ministry of Energy, two nuclear reactors in Romania went offline; this was compounded by weak output from hydroelectric and wind power plants, failures at coal-fired units and a low Danube flow. Moldova, which covers peak demand through its connection with Romania, is directly exposed to this. BANI.md ↗ Ziarul de Gardă ↗

“Why don’t we buy gas from Russia?”

The question asked by part of the public in Moldova was raised directly in the plenary. Deputy Robu put it forward, saying that some citizens were asking it. Tofan answered in factual rather than ideological terms: “Even if we hypothetically had a contract, we would not be able to transport that gas to Moldova; Ukraine does not allow Russian gas to be transported through pipelines on its territory. It is a speculative alternative.” UNIMEDIA ↗

The prime minister also rejected a proposal to cut VAT and excise duty on fuels, submitted that day by MP Olesea Stamate. He argued in terms of who would benefit most from a reduction: “The bigger the car, a BMW with a five-litre engine, the more it gains from a cut in VAT and excise duty. People without cars would pay for it.” BANI.md ↗

When asked where gas should therefore come from, the government responded on Thursday afternoon in a statement by its spokesman Dumitru Ciorici. “We will not sit passively and stare at exchange charts,” he wrote, adding that the cabinet would “actively seek every serious supplementary option that could bring Moldova cheaper gas and better terms, including longer-term contracts and alternative sources”. He specifically mentioned American, Azerbaijani, Qatari and Turkmen gas, saying that every option that was legal, safe and economically advantageous would be assessed. According to him, the government would publish the figures and terms only once the talks produced results. Ziarul de Gardă ↗ BANI.md ↗

Gestures instead of measures

Alongside this, a layer of symbolic steps is under way. Energocom announced savings of 17.5 million lei, or around 870,000 euros, by cutting wage costs and postponing IT investments. Moldovagaz chief Vadim Ceban, as a gesture of solidarity with residents, gave up half his salary for the fourth quarter. Ziarul de Gardă ↗

These sums carry little weight compared with the requested heat price increase, but they say something about how the government is communicating the crisis. When asked about saving energy, Tofan himself mentioned that replacing windows at the government office had been limited to the first three floors. UNIMEDIA ↗

Moldova has been a candidate country for European Union membership since 2022, and Tofan’s government describes joining it as its priority. Energy vulnerability is therefore also a political issue: a country without its own reserves buys electricity through Romanian and Ukrainian interconnections, while Russian gas has become practically unavailable to it after the halt in transit through Ukraine.

Limits of this perspective

A state of emergency is a legal framework, not a list of measures. Published sources say that it will allow the government to act more quickly, but the specific steps it will take on that basis are not yet known, and the full list of powers has likewise not been published. Its consequences can therefore only be assessed in retrospect.

The tariff figures are also still merely requests from three companies. The regulator ANRE will decide on them, and it may approve lower amounts. Likewise, Tuesday’s evening deficit was one particular evening, not a permanent condition, and the sources do not say whether actual outages occurred.

The sources for this article are Moldovan. Ziarul de Gardă and BANI.md are independent newsrooms; UNIMEDIA and Cotidianul are news portals that reported on the proceedings as they unfolded. The opposition’s perspective appears only through questions raised in plenary, so the counterargument to the government’s framing is less strongly represented in the text than the government’s version.

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Illustrative photo: the building of the Moldovan parliament in Chișinău, November 2023. Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.