Government temporarily suspends assistance to investors in solar thermal, wind, solar photovoltaic and biomass energy.
The government has suspended all financial incentives for renewable energy in order to reduce the tariff deficit, now exceeding € 24 billion and growing at an annual rate of between € 3 and € 4 billion, because according to Minister for Industry José Manuel Soria “it could end up becoming a serious financial issue.” He affirmed that it is also a contribution to reducing the public deficit. The measure will not be retroactive and will only apply to new applications for installations.
Soria gave assurances that the measure was “temporary” however provided no indication of how long it would last. He also did not specify how much the government expected to save from this restraint on renewable energy. He only indicated that, according to the Ministry´s estimates, this year´s demand for pre-registration the preliminary step to obtain feed-in tariffs was 500 MW of renewable energy that “would not be implemented”, thus providing a saving of € 160 million.
The measure will not affect installations already in operation, subsidies that have already been authorised or plants already registered for preassignment of feed-in tariffs by the Ministry.
During 2011, renewable energy benefited from subsidies totalling more than € 6.5 billion with the figure this year rising to more than € 7.2 billion.
The Minister advised that the restraint on renewable energy did not imply problems in terms of generation, production or capacity and that this was only a first step in the electricity system reform process, about which he did not provide specific details.