According to the news agency Europa Press, during a working breakfast organised by the New Energy Forum on Wednesday, the CNE President said that the regulatory body she heads up was "shocked" during its investigation of this potential fraud after seeing first hand "how badly some photovoltaic plants are measured”, with incorrectly set meters recording electricity generated at midday as having been produced at twelve o'clock at night. In any event, Maria Teresa Costa "no companies can be picked out or identified" as having committed the hypothetical fraud.
After comparing data, in addition to the aforementioned time lags the CNE identified three technical errors that led to solar energy being recorded as having been generated at night. The first involved a "misclassification" of plants leading to certain wind farms being classified as photovoltaic arrays. The second was caused by poor "measurement profiling", i.e. the figure for the output of some plants is for long timeframes which makes it difficult to distinguish properly between day and night. And the third had to do with "the rounding-up of electricity sent to the grid," a matter which the CNE is still working on. This latter imbalance could affect 1.1 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of the total photovoltaic output of 750 GWh generated between February and March.
This is the third time accusations of fraud committed by the photovoltaic industry have been dismissed. Previously, the Second Vice President and Minister of the Economy and Employment of Castile and Leon, Tomás Villanueva Rodríguez, sent Spain’s Minister of Industry the opinion of the four big power companies operating in this region dismissing accusations of fraud. Meanwhile, the Spanish Photovoltaic Industry Association (ASIF) also contributed its research on the subject, as reported previously by Renewable Energy Magazine’s sister publication, Energías Renovables.
Cutting premiums
The CNE President has called for premiums for electricity generated using renewable technologies to be cut. Maria Teresa Costa has indicated that the energy market is faced with an untenable situation, with high access costs and a deficit that reduce the payment capability of end buyers who cannot continue to shoulder the increased costs. She therefore believes it is therefore necessary to introduce a higher level of rationality in terms of both the subsidies and their allocation.
The scheme for remunerating producers of renewable energy is not adequate and Costa claims that had the CNE’s recommendations for streamlining the system been followed, approximately €400 million per annum would have been saved. The CNE President said that it was vital to redirect the allocation of premiums based on the share of each technology in the energy mix, and mentioned that 43% of premiums were allocated to solar energy, which provides 3,000 megawatts to the system, while wind contributes six times more to the system.
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