site.btaToplofikatsiya Sofia Ordered to Compensate 6,197 Customers

Toplofikatsiya Sofia must calculate within a month the compensation due to 6,197 customers left without heating and hot water for more than 48 hours after network failures in December 2025 and January 2026, the Energy and Water Regulatory Commission (EWRC) said on Friday.

The company will then have seven days to compensate customers served by 164 affected substations. The order followed the approval of a report from an extraordinary inspection launched by EWRC Chair Plamen Mladenovski after a complaint from the ombudsman over emergency cuts to heating and hot water supply in Sofia.

Under binding written instructions from EWRC, Toplofikatsiya Sofia has 30 days to calculate individual compensation for each customer left without heating because of the company’s fault, based on the heat energy not delivered after the first 48 hours of the outage. The regulator said 5,473 customers in Lyulin-6 were without heating for 50 hours and will be compensated for a two-hour delay, while 222 customers in Mladost-3 will be compensated for 77 hours after an outage there was repaired in 125 hours. Another 369 customers in Dianabad will be compensated for a 56-hour delay after repairs took 104 hours, and 133 customers in Poligona were left without heating and hot water for 77 hours after repairs to a network failure were delayed by 29 hours.

During an extraordinary inspection, EWRC found that in the cases affecting 6,197 customers, Toplofikatsiya Sofia had breached the terms of its licences for heat production, combined heat and power generation, and heat transmission, and had failed to comply with its General Terms and Conditions. Under those terms, no compensation is payable if a network failure is repaired within 48 hours, but after that all affected customers are entitled to compensation equal to the undelivered heat energy for the period of the delay. The regulator said the amount is calculated on the basis of the average energy supplied by the relevant substation during an earlier period under similar conditions and supply regime.

Compensation will be paid automatically, in the same way customers pay for the heat energy they use, with no action required on their part. After making the payments, Toplofikatsiya Sofia must provide EWRC with proof of the steps taken, including the names and addresses of the customers, the duration of the heat supply disruption, and the amount and method used to calculate each payment.

The commission said its order for Toplofikatsiya Sofia to pay penalties was another step to protect consumers in dealings with monopoly providers. During the inspection, EWRC found the company had failed to meet its obligation to compensate affected customers, in breach of its General Terms and Conditions, which form an integral part of its licence. The regulator added that, under Article 201, paragraph 1, item 3 of the Energy Act, its binding written order to take specific action within a set deadline is a compulsory administrative measure aimed at removing the harmful effects of the violation.

The inspection of Toplofikatsiya Sofia started on January 21.

Compensation for consumers left without heating for more than 48 hours has been a recurring issue around Toplofikatsiya Sofia. In late 2025, planned repairs in Druzhba 2 were set to affect more than 120 residential buildings and nearly 40,000 people, prompting public complaints and questions about compensation for prolonged interruptions, while then-energy minister Zhecho Stankov criticized the scale and timing of the outage. In November 2025, municipal councillor Simeon Stavrev warned that the utility’s network was outdated, losses remained high and service reliability was not improving. The issue resurfaced in January 2026, when Ombudsman Velislava Delcheva said the company should compensate affected customers if, through its own fault, it failed to repair damage to the heat transmission network or subscriber stations within 48 hours, citing repeated outages in several Sofia districts and a case in which residents had been left without heating and hot water for more than two months after a November 2025 leak.