Greece to connect 1 GW of installed solar PV projects

Pospief, the association of solar producers in Greece, has confirmed that about 1 GW of installed PV projects in Greece are still waiting to connect to the grid due to the Greek distribution system’s inability to accommodate new small-scale PV capacity, aside from net-metering projects. 

HEDNO, Greece’s distribution grid operator, often takes up to 12 months to process grid-connection requests, even though it is supposed to do so within four months. Built projects below 500 kW in size that wait to connect to the grid are often in danger of losing the stable feed-in tariff (FIT) rates that Greece provides.

Greece’s licensing policies are theoretically robust, with set deadlines to be respected by state institutions and renewable energy investors. However, these time scales have never been respected by HEDNO, Tsikouras said, Pospief General Secretary. New legislation (Law 4951/2022) is designed to expedite the licensing process for renewables even more so green projects can be fully licensed within about a year. A clear process applies to small-scale solar farms that need to connect to the grid. Investors start by applying for a grid-connection license from HEDNO, and if a grid-connection request is fully documented, HEDNO issues a preliminary license within four months, detailing all terms and conditions of the contract.

Investors then have two months to accept or reject these terms and conditions. If the investor agrees, HEDNO will sign a final grid-connection agreement within four months, allowing the project to connect to the grid. However, small PV plants were able to secure stable FITs by Dec. 31, 2022, as long as they were connected to the grid within set deadlines. Nonetheless, HEDNO was often unable to connect such projects to the grid in a timely manner, so the government came to the rescue by allowing offline projects to retain their FIT rates if they could prove they were built on time.