Apparently, there is going to be a law that will not allow smaller grid-connected installations for the consumer market. This means that smaller projects, usually found in urban areas (rooftops etc) will be illegal and will not be able to connect to the national electricity company, DEH and sell power to the Hellenic Transmission System Operator DESMIE.
The ingenious folks at the Ministry of Environment have decided that smaller, grid-connected installations should be considered industrial – which are not allowed in residential areas (and not as distributed solar installations as classified in other countries, including Germany). Only off-grid solar installations will be allowed in populated areas (don’t ask why they allowed this; off-grid in urban areas is probably useless in most cases).
Greenpeace has published an
article on this (only in Greek) that is aptly titled “Tombstone for solar projects” and the press community has started expressing its disdain. This is the latest in a series of complications on behalf of the Greek State that is trying to promote the development of solar energy in Greece (by buying a solar kWh from Euro 0.45-0.50) but not simplifying the installation and legistation regarding solar energy. The procedures to enter the solar energy market are very complicated, and an applicant has to go through a myriad of commitees to get approved.We were expecting legislation to get simpler and smaller home projects to be further promoted but we were not expecting the state to completely block smaller installations. In our opinion, the Greek state has opened the solar market backwards: instead of promoting smaller installations first and then moving to MW-parks (so that the public is educated and familiarised with solar energy), they have opened the latter and hindered the home market. There are several reasons why we think the smaller market is of more importance (to be analysed in a future post).