Tuesday 4 March 2014
European Commission verifies if competition has not been violated in Polish energy sector
On February
20,2014 European Commission took steps to verify if Polish energy companies (PGE, Tauron, Enea, Energa and PAK) did not receive state
aid. They are particularly interested if two types of electricity generators
from RES are not unlawfully subsidized, to be precise: power plants using
combined technology of waste and coal combustion as well as old hydro power
plants. According to EC, there is a high possibility that the principal of competitiveness has been violated. Producers who produce electricity from RES received Green Certificates (GC) which then could be sold to companies in need ( particularly conventional power plants that need to compensate their emissions with GC). Considering the fact that RES is a source with almost zero variable cost, competition in production of electricity might have been violated.
From the documents of the EU Directorate-General
for Competition (retrieved by WysokieNapiecie.pl ), Brussels is interested in four threads : whether
support is essential to the type of RES power plants and if they could function if support is redundant;
if the aid does not dissuade renewable energy from competing
on the normal market and whether the support is not granted for more than 10 years.
In the worst situation, European Commission
might require return of wrongly spent financial grants. During 10 years of the existence
of Green Certificate System, participants of the system spent almost 20 million
zloty ( roughly 5 million euro ). Nearly half of that amount most likely supported the
co-combustion and old hydro power plants.
Original
article: http://wysokienapiecie.pl/
Picture
illustrates Barrage Debe, retrieved from the website of Regionalny Zarząd Gospodarki Wodnej w Warszawie (Regional Office of Water
Management in Warsaw)
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