With its new Green Electricity Act the Austrian government has created one of the most attractive environments in the world for renewable energy and CHP projects. For PV though, the excitement looks to be short-lived due to the low capacity threshold.

Until now, the Austrian framework for renewable energy project implementation was rather muddled, with geography being the overriding factor for planning and investment regulations, value and duration of buy-back incentives, and even levy arrangements which varied significantly from state to state. Such discrepancies have been removed now with the implementation of the nationwide act which harmonises the green electricity investment incentives and establishes a long-term guaranteed tariff for each technology irrespective of project location. It also provides an equitable distribution of costs across the country.

For grid-connected PV systems installed from January 2003 the feed-in tariff is set at 60 Eurocents per kWh for systems up to 20 kW, while larger systems attract a healthy 0,47 EUR/kWh. Both are guaranteed for 13 years. However, there is a flaw; crucially the PV tariff availability is capped to a national capacity of 15 MW, and the 9 MW already installed by the end of 2002 counts towards this cap. With a further 6,5 MW requested between the programme launch and the first of February 2003, the budget appears to have been spent before the programme really had a chance to take-off. Concerted lobbying by the PV industry is going to be needed to ensure that this shadow does not obscure the sunshine.

Contact:

• Roland Bründlinger
  Fax: +43 (0)50 550 6390

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