Latest URE report on small-scale RES installations: volume of electricity generation has increased 50 times since 2016!
The President of the Energy Regulatory Office (URE) has published the annual report on electricity generation in small-scale RES installations. In 2022, our country saw a record increase in the number of generators and installations but these results were largely influenced by the change in the definition of small-scale installations. Photovoltaics have been invariably the most popular.
Under current regulations, small-scale installation is defined as a unit with a total installed capacity ranging between 50 kW and 1 MW, connected to a network with a voltage lower than 110 kV[1]. Until the end of 2021, however, the maximum capacity for a small-scale generator was 0.5 MW.
Over the whole of last year, the number of power generators in the register of small-scale generators[2] increased from 1292 to 2448, i.e. by nearly 90 per cent. In contrast, the number of registered installations increased by 2327 units, from 1932 to 4259, an increase of 120 per cent. More than 70 per cent of these (3056) are solar thermal installations.
Fig. 1. Small-scale RES installations in 2021 and 2022.
The total capacity of small-scale installations also increased significantly: from 1 GW to more than 3 GW, and consequently also the amount of energy they produced: from 532 GWh to 6.7 TWh. Photovoltaic farms accounted for the bulk of power supply. They produced over 4.6 TWh which corresponds to 69 per cent of all electricity generated by small-scale RES installations.
Biogas installations were the second largest source in terms of the volume of electricity produced, with the volume of nearly 1.4 TWh, representing around 20 per cent of the electricity generated by small-scale installations in 2022. Next came wind installations with more than 6 per cent of production and hydropower plants (4 per cent). Biomass installations are still marginal in the mix, having generated just 0.11 per cent of the total electricity volume from small-scale RES installations.
Reports on small-scale RES power generation have been prepared and published by the Energy Regulatory Office since 2016. Over the past eight years, the number of power generators in installations of this type has increased sixfold, from around 400 to more than 2,400 operators, and the amount of energy produced has increased over fifty times.
We invite you to read the full report.
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- In 2022, the total share of RES installations in the overall electricity production in Poland reached nearly 16 per (based on PSE, Fig. 6.2).
- A report on energy generation in RES micro-installations was published by the Regulator in March