Poland: President signs new RES act.

New Renewable Energy Sources (RES) act changes the existing regulation significantly.

On 27th of June 2016 the Polish president signed the Act amending the Renewable Energy Sources Act. On the basis of the said amendments inter alia a new definition of prosument shall be introduced, as well as the way of clearing of surpluses of energy produced by prosuments in micro-installations shall be regulated.

According to the Act, prosument is defined as a producer of electric energy only from the renewable energy sources in micro-installation in order to use it for own purposes, not connected with the economic activity. The surplus of produced energy may be inserted to the electricity grid in the energy seller’s favour. So inserted energy may be cleared with the energy taken from the electricity grid in relation 1 to 0.7 for installations with the power between 10 kW and 40 kW and in relation 1 to 0.8 for installations with power less than 10 kW.
Surpluses of energy received by energy sellers and not used by prosuments (i.e. energy exceeding foreseen proportion of 1 to 0.7 or 1 to 0.8 or energy not used by prosuments during foreseen period of 365 days) do not constitute any tax income for the energy sellers.

Biogas, biomass and dedicated co-firing projects are the big winners of the draft. Therefore, the RES act also alter the set-up of the auction buckets, which are now much more technology-specific and give preference to utilities and renewable technologies that can deliver base-load power.

Poland’s RES industry is anxiously expecting the publication of the details for the first auction. All of this means that the industry is facing more months of uncertainty and possibly years of weak growth.