Restoration plans, green transitions, green energy… these wonders sound distant to the average person. When he hears “renewable energy”, for example, he imagines a huge space with giant fins, from which some “chick-flicker” is amassing new wads, and the economy is being “restructured” to help him. The truth is that the common man is not deluded in his judgement. Where is he in the whole story?
But there are people who disapprove of the economy and politics being set up just so. They believe that everything that is done around green ideas should be addressed precisely to the common man. How? Well, like the state making it easy for him to put a photovoltaic panel on his roof or balcony – that panel being the point of green, not the park with fins.
A person with this understanding of things is Ilian Iliev, chairman of the Public Center for Environment and Sustainable Development. He himself is an example that the pyramid can indeed be reversed – he has had a solar installation in his home for years.
It does not cost an exorbitant expense. It doesn’t cost any gigantic effort. Of course, for things to happen to more and more people, the country itself needs to turn its stereotypes on their head. And the winds invading from Europe should not roar high in the skies, but also “come down” low to the people.
However, numerous small domestic photovoltaic plants on the roofs of residential buildings have been disconnected from the grid and cannot sell the surplus electricity they generate, which they do not consume for their personal needs. This is why Ilian Iliev is sounding the alarm. The process has developed in an avalanche after the change in the Renewable Energy Sources Act (RESA) last autumn. The amendment was made to facilitate households’ access to alternative energy sources and the possibility for them to produce the electricity they need themselves and return the surplus to the grid. “The legislator included everything that the European Union required in order to reduce the bureaucracy of connection, to regulate net metering, energy cooperatives. However, in the final provisions they wrote that the energy distribution companies are not obliged to provide all this. After the promulgation of the law, I received a letter from Energo Pro saying that according to the changes in the law, they are not obliged to buy the electricity produced by my home rooftop plant and they are terminating the contract.” This is what Iliev had to say, according to whom “we changed the law so that it sounds very good to the European Commission, but in fact does not stimulate the use of renewable energy by households.”
