Alina Oprea • 22 May, 2023 at 9:22 AM
Romania requests, through the RePowerEU mechanism, substantial European funds for subsidizing the installation of photovoltaic panels for natural persons. It is about €400 million, the amount that could be included in some complementary program to the Environmental Fund Administration program for installing photovoltaic panels on residential homes. The interest of individuals in the installation of individual photovoltaic systems is very high in Romania. On Friday, May 19, this year's edition of the "Photovoltaic Green House" program began, through which first individuals from Bucharest and Ilfov could register in the AFM platform to receive the subsidy of RON20,000 (€5,000). The budget ran out in eight minutes after nearly 5,000 applications were submitted.
The AFM budget for Casa Verde Fotocoltaice 2023 is about RON1.7 billion (€340 million).
"Perhaps the most important thing is that we have proposed a €400 million project with a kind of - we don't want to call it a competitor - but a kind of complementary program to the AFM program for installing photovoltaic panels on residential homes", says Cătălin Costache, general director of the General Directorate for Recovery and Resilience Mechanism Management in the Ministry of European Investments and Projects (MIPE).
In March, the Ministry of Investments and European Projects presented the projects that it wants to propose to the Commission to be financed through RePowerEU - Costache said that they are already informally discussing with the Commission - and there one of the programs was: "Use of residential buildings to accelerate the implementation of energy from renewable sources - Granting of vouchers to stimulate the installation of photovoltaic panels and related energy storage systems for residential buildings belonging to individuals".
At that time, the allocation that MIPE was talking about was only €237 million.
The system promoted by MIPE, if it will also receive European funding, is different from the Casa Verde Photovoltaic program of AFM, and involves the granting of vouchers of RON25,000 (€5,000) to each beneficiary who will install a photovoltaic installation of at least 3 kW.
"The main role in the voucher mechanism is played by the beneficiaries, natural persons, who intend to install PV on the roofs of the houses they own, but the mechanism aims to access the voucher under certain pre-conditions that assure the financier that the project will be achieved in the interval available within the target contained in the REPowerEU component of the PNRR. These pre-conditions refer to the existence of a contract and implicitly a technical project related to installing photovoltaic panels on the roof of the building owned by the natural person with a power of at least 3 kw net", said MIPE at the time.
The vouchers would be granted by a coordinator established at the MIPE level, to individuals who request them and who will register, with the requested documents, in a digital platform, on a first-come-first-served basis. Afterward, the beneficiary and the contracted company must carry out the project by installing a PV system with a power of at least 3kw net. Upon completion of the project, the beneficiary will send the installation documents certified by the installation company, together with the payment invoice and the proof of obtaining the technical approval for the connection to the coordinator established by MIPE, who within 5 working days will transfer the value of the voucher to the related account the photovoltaic systems installation company.
At the end of February, over 48,000 prosumers connected to the networks in Romania, of which 43,000 were natural persons. The total capacity installed in the prosumers' power plants is about 535 MW, of which 281 MW is for individuals and 254 MW is for legal entities.