New rules passed by the European Commission will allow the Czech state to check whether it was too generous with renewable energy companies in the past. Companies that received state funds between 2006 – 2008, when solar farm boom began in the Czech Republic, will have to fill out questionnaires to determine whether they will have to return funds. In some cases, companies could end up having to return billions of crowns worth of subsidies.
“The goal is to determine if the operational support of electric plants using renewable energy sources was set correctly,” according to the spokesman of the Ministry of Industry Kryštof Čeřovský. A total of 255 plants will be surveyed in the first phase of the investigation but far more will take place in 2019 and 2020, according to Hospodářské noviny. Solar plants will be audited along with wind farms, biogas and biomass electric plants. The boom in solar farms is of particular interest because the level of support was originally supposed to guarantee a 15-year return on investment period. Soon after, however, solar panel prices dropped rapidly but the original subsidy calculations remained in place for too long.
