Image Credit: NickWinslow (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This is what you call bad solar policy, bad investment and business policy, and overall bad policy. Greece has retroactively cut solar feed-in tariffs (FiTs) by 30% on average. Of course, it comes as part of broader economic problems in Greece.
Feed-in tariffs aren’t the only thing being cut either.
“The new measures ask solar photovoltaic energy producers to contribute 35% of their 2013 income to the Greek electricity market operator LAGIE. The intention is to plug a €700 million gap in LAGIE’s fund used, which is used to pay renewable energy producers in Greece. The country has promised its international lenders – the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – that it will completely eliminate LAGIE’s fund deficit by the end of 2014,” PV Magazine writes.
“While the same measures also apply to other renewable power producers, they are currently only required though to contribute 10% of their 2013 income to the LAGIE fund, with one exception: rooftop solar PV installations are exempted completely from this measure.”
Here are some details on the FiT cuts:
The second measure introduced by YPEKA regards the drastic reduction of FITs for operational RES plants. Again, solar PV installations face the sharpest reductions, which on average reach 30% of the initial tariffs. Retroactive FIT cuts also apply to rooftop installations.
A smoother FIT reduction, around 20% on average, applies to smaller PV projects up to 20 kW each that are not installed on buildings, and to those projects owned by farmers should they not exceed 100 kW each.
Other renewable energy systems such as wind and hydro projects have been instructed to take a much smaller FIT reduction of around 5-6% on average.
Reductions for solar PV FITs have taken into account a number of factors, such as the technology used, the time of project development, the cost of the installation, and even the location (specifically differentiating between projects in mainland Greece and in the smaller electricity grids of the many Greek islands). A critical factor also taken into account is whether a RES project has received any additional form of aid (e.g direct subsidy, tax exemption). FITs for projects receiving such aids face even sharper cuts.
Read more over on PV Magazine.
