From now energy-intensive production enterprises will not buy less green certificates. Such a conclusion was made by the Ukrainian Biofuel Portal pelleta.com.ua which analyzed the situation on the Polish energy market. At the same time, the support for small energy generating companies working on alternative fuels is canceled. That is stated in the amendment to the Polish Energy Law, which was approved on Friday by the government coalition. The measures also affected the Polish market of natural gas.
The enterprises of 10 industries which use at least 100 GW of electricity per hour will no longer have to buy the same amount of green certificates as other consumers. The reduction will be from 20 to 80% depending on the energy output. The representatives of the Polish Ministry of Economy said that the total volume of the exemption from the certificate purchase will be equivalent to 730 GWh of green energy. It is logical that the demand for certificates will decrease by the same amount.
However, according to the Director of Renewable Energy at the Ministry of Economy Janusz Pilitovskiy, after the approval of new amendments the government will prepare the decree regulating the mechanism of certificates’ redemption, and thus the demand for them will stay on the same level. According to Mr. Pilitovskiy, the new amendment may become a good incentive to comply with the commitment to develop green energy sector by controlling the number of certificates.
Contrary to previous declarations about the support of distributed energy, the government representatives did not approve the amendment proposed by Palikot movement regarding the exemption of small-scale green energy, heat and biogas producers from licensing.
Also the coalition rejected the second amendment of the movement, which was supposed to improve the transparency of green certificates market. The proposed rules implied certain obligations of the Ministry of Economy connected with collection and exchange of the information on issued licenses, produced green energy, as well as requested, issued and redeemed green certificates (monthly and quarterly). Now this activity is performed by several separate organizations and their published data are often very different.
The government also approved new obligations related to the Polish gas market. Now gas suppliers must offer to sell the particular volume of their fuel on the commodity exchange: by the end of 2013 it will be 30%, in the first half of 2014 - 50%, from the 1st of July 2014 - 70%. This law was approved by the majority of parliamentary votes, only the representatives from PiS and Palikot's Movement voted against it.
Author: Sergei Kozlov
