On 1 July 2018, the day after being published, another amendment to the Renewable Energy Sources Act came into force. Its purpose is, this time, to unblock investments into renewable energy sources by way of improving and resuming auctioning.
However, the elemental purpose of the new regulation is to improve the auctioning rules which will facilitate unblocking new auctions and launching new investments into RES.
The amendment includes, first of all, the new rule of public aid cumulation. One of the admissibility conditions of such support provides that the operational support value needs to be reduced by the total previously granted investment support. This condition expresses the so called cumulation rule the purpose of which is to ensure that the aid (or any other support) granted to one investment – from various sources – is proportionate, i.e. is limited to the minimum value necessary to execute the investment, which was ensured by the Ministry of Energy.
The new regulations introduce also changes to the rules of investing into wind farms and attempt to clarify these rules with regard to the 2016 Act on Investments in Wind Farms, including by way of clarifying the rules of windmill taxation and restoring the previously applied interpretation which was more favourable for the investors.
The long-awaited act provides also for a new support mechanism intended for small RES electricity generators, namely the feed-in tariffs (FiT) or feed-in-premiums (FiP). This refers to installations with a capacity of up to 500 kW and from 500 kW to 1 MW of installed power for selected technologies (hydropower and biogas).
The fixed purchase price, binding for 15 years, in the case of FiT and FiP mechanisms is to amount to 90% of the reference price for a given installation type (biogas or hydropower plant) and is to be annually adjusted according to the previous calendar years’ annual average consumer price index.
The adopted act does not introduce many changes with regard to microinstallations. The changes include reduction of their maximum capacity from 40 kW to 50 kW and new taxation rules concerning the prosumer discount system settlements.
