Mott's Blog

The biggest development in the renewable energy prospective market in Poland is the new amendment in the Sejm, which has passed the committee and appears to be sailing for rapid rubber-stamping by the rest of the government in Warsaw. The single biggest characteristic of the law is the emergence of separate technology "baskets" for renewable energy auctions. The Polish Government figured out that it can control the mix of technologies by setting the size of the baskets as well as the reference prices (maximum allowed support in the form of a contract for the difference). Regardless of any other developments, it appears that this procedure will be used to skew the support away from PV and wind to biogas and biomass. The characteristic being used to "make the cut" is the stability and reliability of the renewable energy source. The intermittent nature of PV and wind have led the Polish Government to put them into a less desirable category in baskets which can be l...

The new government in Poland has announced its intention to much more actively promote and support biogas development. We are excited by this change in attitude and are trying to provide them with accurate information and policy suggestions to make it happen. The details have been provided today by the Polish Biogas Association. We basically argue against using auctions for biogas and other smaller RES projects (citing a lot of studies and data). PBA also asks that the current system be fixed by providing a weighted certificate value based on the cost of production of the various technologies (as will be required by the European Commission in their review of the certificate program). We think that program should be continued for several years, even to 2020, to assure that there is a continuous construction of new facilities of all types.  The new auctions will not occur this year at this point and if they go ahead next year with two to four years to wait before new projects tha...