Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) research often relies on proprietary data, limiting reproducibility, an issue especially acute for Central and Eastern European grids, where open load data are scarce despite demand patterns differing from Western Europe and North America. Prior Romanian load forecasting work used public TSO data but covered only the COVID-19 period and released no reusable dataset. We address this gap by releasing a multi-year, 15-minute resolution Romanian national load dataset, harmonized with population-weighted weather and holiday covariates, built entirely from open sources. We complement it with an exploratory analysis of temporal, climatic, and calendar-driven demand structure, plus a reproducible benchmark, from classical baselines to gradient-boosted trees, testing whether open-data models can match performance reported with proprietary data.