Planned new regulations for solar cell equipment in Greece

The Greek government intends to put forward a draft law on reducing bureaucracy and simplifying licensing and exploitation procedures for renewable sources of energy. The draft makes provision for incentives and measures to promote the development of “green energy”, which the Prime Minister described as a “one-way street” for combating the crisis. For her part the Environment minister pointed out that “The aim of the draft law is to increase generation of power from renewable sources of energy to 20% of total power production by 2020 and 40% of power production from electrical energy.” Greece currently produces only 6.7% of its power from renewable sources of energy, such as solar cells. The new draft law aims to fundamentally reorganise the regulatory framework for licensing renewable energy projects, create the necessary structures for project implementation in areas with increased renewable energy potential, modify the existing legal framework for special utilization, introduce a comprehensive bundle of incentives, stipulate prices within the renewable energy field, and motivate creation of renewable energy-gross-CHP. Another important point is reduction of the time the licensing procedure takes from the current 3 to 5 years to 8 to 10 months. The process for grant of a power generation licence will furthermore be separated from environmental licensing. As a result the preliminary process for auditing the environmental conditions and the process for granting permits under nature protection law will be standardised. The …