Draft Government Bill on amendment regarding the feed-in tariff for wind energy in Finland
The Ministry of Employment and the Economy has publicized the draft Government Bill on the feed-in tariff scheme amendment regarding wind energy today.
The draft Bill does not include any amendments to the total quota of 2,500 MVA for wind energy eligible for the feed-in tariff, even though a reduction to 2,000 MVA was suggested in the Government Programme issued on 29 May. Furthermore, neither would the amount or period of payment of the subsidy be amended. Instead, the draft Bill is targeted at controlled closure of the quota scheme for wind energy once the quota of 2,500 MVA has been reached.
The controlled closure of the scheme is affected by two central means. First of all, pursuant to the draft Bill, a valid quota reservation decision would become a mandatory precondition for entry into the scheme. Secondly, quota reservation decisions would no longer be granted once the combined nominal capacity of the wind turbine generators exceeds 2,500 MVA for the first time on basis of the granted quota decisions and amount of wind power plants already approved into the scheme. Once the quota of 2,500 MVA is reached for the first time, all pending excess quota reservation applications would be dismissed by the Energy Authority and no further applications could be filed. In practice, this would also mean that if a wind park project is delayed and will not manage to file a final approval application within the period of validity of the quota decision, the respective share of the reserved quota would not be released for the use of other wind parks.
Pursuant to the draft Bill, the final application for entry into the feed-in tariff scheme has to be filed before the commercial operation of the wind park is started and before the quota decision expires. Pursuant to the draft Bill, the validity of the quota decision would also be amended. The quota decision would be valid for a period of two years, but not longer than until November 2017. In practice, this means that the operators would not be able to benefit from the potentially longer processing time of the large amount of recently filed quota applications in terms of project development schedule.
Other minor proposals are mainly targeted at simplifying the administrative procedure. According to the draft Bill, the operators would no longer be obligated to file an advance notice with the Energy Authority nor to notify the Energy Authority if the total capacity of the wind turbine generators is reduced from the capacity reserved in the quota decision.
As a next step, the draft Government Bill is circulated for comments until 30 July 2015. After this, the finalized Government Bill will be submitted to the Parliament for consideration. The legislative amendment is expected to come into force in fall 2015.
According to the draft Bill, the legislative work for development of the new subsidy scheme is envisaged to be started in fall 2015. According to the Government Programme, the new scheme will be based on technology neutrality and ranking of economic affordability.