Poland launches €235 million solar rebate program

Poland’s Ministry of Energy today launched an ambitious rebate scheme for residential PV with a total budget of 1 billion PLN (approximately €235 million).

According to the Polish government’s announcement, the scheme, dubbed Mój Prąd (My Electricity), will grant rebates for a maximum of 5,000 PLN (about $1,325) per project and will be available only for residential PV projects ranging from 2 kW to 10 kW in capacity.

The minister of energy, Krzysztof Tchórzewski, said applications for the rebates will be accepted until funds are exhausted. He also added the number of prosumers relying on small-sized rooftop PV under net metering, which stood around 65,000 at the end of last year, may increase by additional 200,000 through this new scheme.

“The scheme is part of a few new incentives that were recently introduced by the government for small-scale solar, which also include low-cost credits for PV micro-intallations,” Piotr Pająk of renewable energy news site Gramwzielone.pl, said to pv magazine. 

But this is not the only good news for solar in the country. On July 19, the Polish Parliament approved a new renewable energy act, which will make the wind and solar energy auctions planned for this and next year move forward. “It still needs to be approved by [the] other chamber of Parliament, but this seems obvious and should happen by the end of July,” Pajak further explained.

“Among the auctions for this year, there will be one dedicated to wind-solar projects up to 1 MW,” he added. “The government believes that the winner of the auction will be PV with total capacity of around 0.7 GW. There will also be an auction for larger wind and solar projects, but in this case the winner will be wind with capacity of even up to 2 GW.”

Furthermore, the RES act has been extended to businesses and energy communities access to net metering, which previously was granted exclusively to residential, government entities, and housing communities. Net metering came into force in Poland in 2016.

Poland reached a cumulative installed solar PV capacity of 486.5 MW last year, according to provisional figures released by domestic solar industry association Polska PV.