Alina Oprea • 21 March, 2023 at 3:45 PM
The capacities to produce electricity from renewable energy sources register a significant increase in the Republic of Moldova. According to the data of the Agency for Energy Efficiency, the installed capacities of electricity production through power plants that capitalize on renewable energy sources (photovoltaic, wind, hydroelectric, and biogas cogeneration power plants), have increased 3 times since 2018. Thus, at the end of 2022, the total installed power was 206.81 MW, compared to 61.6 MW at the end of 2018.
More than half of the total electricity generation capacity from renewable energy sources is wind (56%), followed by photovoltaic power plants, including net metering, with 29%, hydroelectric power plants with 8% of capacity, and power plants in cogeneration on biogas with a weight of 7%.
Photovoltaic installations have registered a significant jump in the evolution of electricity production capacities - almost 15 times in 5 years. Thus, the capacity to produce electricity through photovoltaic installations, including net metering, increased from 4.02 MW in 2018 to 60.13 MW in 2022.
Net metering includes the production capacities of consumers, natural or legal persons, who own power plants for their own consumption and who have the right to deliver the surplus of produced energy to the network.
At the end of 2022, 1,886 beneficiaries of the Net Metering support mechanism were registered, a cumulative number for the period 2018-2022, with a total cumulative power of 33.47 MW. At the end of 2018, there were only 57 beneficiaries of the net metering mechanism, with a cumulative capacity of 542.3 kW.
The capacity to produce electricity through wind installations has increased approximately 3 times - from 35.6 MW in 2018 to 115.1 MW in 2022. At the same time, the capacity to produce electricity through biogas cogeneration power plants has increased almost 2.7 times from 5.7 MW to 15.3 MW.