Mott's Blog

We finally, it appears at least, have a new law on renewable energy in Poland. The process has been ugly, ignorant and often deceitful. Like all efforts at government control of economic activity, it will be full of unintended consequences. The day of reckoning in Brussels has been postponed until now, but not canceled.  The two biggest issues facing the country in RES are first the transition from one support system to another (understanding that many facilities will continue to have Green Certificates, that the quota system remains in place,  and that auctions in 2016 or 2017 may do relatively little to affect the mix of RES in 2020). This issue also has the enormous problem of revolving around unnotified unlawful state aid in the form of the certificates. This year, Poland will likely get the final notice from the Commission that this has to stop, meaning that another piece of legislation trying to retroactively adjust the current system to EU law will be required. This...

   The impetus for Polish policy supporting biogas has been almost entirely from the stand-point of agriculture (narrowly defined). The Ministry of Agriculture has been the only Ministry taking biogas seriously (the Ministry of Environment seems to forget that biogas has a critical organic waste management role). The vision of the Ministry of Agriculture (until recently anyway) was for small farm-based biogas plants averaging 250 kW in capacity. Ironically, while sacrificing every other biogas application to this vision, the current proposed law does little to help farmers get into the biogas business.    Every serious discussion of biogas policy needs to start with how much it actually cost. The Institute for Renewable Energy documented the cost of biogas last July in their report to the Ministry of Economy using multiple sources. Their data were realistic and no one has seriously questioned their conclusions: biogas requires substantially more support than the fl...