Our rights on clean energy

To be self-sufficient with clean electric energy is our right, and we should fight by doing all that is legally possible not to pay any special taxes to the government for producing clean energy.

In Spain, the so called ‘sun tax’ is already dead. After years of political, legal and social battles, on Friday, October 5, the Government of Spain eliminated it. The doubt that remains is, what happens now?

I have examined the Royal Decree 15/2018, of October 5, on urgent measures for energy transition and the protection of consumers, and attempted to analyse the keys items of energy self-consumption in Spain. Something that does not end with the repeal of the ‘sun tax’, in fact it has just started.

The sun tax is dead. Long live PV panels

Until now, when we spoke of 'self-consumption', the image that came to our mind was, basically, solar panels on the roof of our single-family house. And it was for a good reason, when self-consumption was regulated in 2015, it was expressly forbidden that the same facility could be used by several residents of the same building.

It was not an anecdotal decision as about 67% of all Spaniards live in blocks of flats. So prohibiting shared self-consumption reduced the playing field in a very important way. After two years of legal battles, the Constitutional Court annulled the prohibition on June 2, 2017.

The new legislation includes this right to shared self-consumption and changes its definition to include it. In addition, and this is very important, from now on it will not be necessary for the installation to be inside the same building, it is enough for it to be close to the consumers. In this way, neighbourhood communities will have much greater capacity (and flexibility) when it comes to shared self-consumption.

The administrative hell of paperwork

Although shared self-consumption once again became legal, it did not make it achievable. As we already heard in August of this year, the first shared installation in the country required a year of paperwork and bureaucracy for an administrative authorisation that, on paper, should have only needed a couple of weeks.

Therefore, the key change in this reform was the part that affected the dreaded paperwork, bureaucracy and administrative procedures. And this Decree has decided to do away with these time consuming formalities: only large facilities that are going to pour electricity into the grid must ask permission from the electric companies to connect. Domestic facilities are exempt from this requirement, which is something that, together with a specific meter for selfconsumption and the end of the obligation to sign up for self-consumption records, simplifies the process.

No more charges, no more tolls

This is another of the central themes of the Decree: the prohibition of establishing charges or tolls for all renewable energy that is going to be self-consumed. Although it is true that for domestic installations this has no real effect, because in those cases the ‘sun tax’ was not levied, it solves the biggest problem we had until now: the insecurity derived from not knowing when to start taxing domestic self-consumption.

With this prohibition, the implicit threat that this entailed is alleviated and the foundations are laid for commencing any necessary investment. However, the politically unstable times in which we live plays against the Decree. Nobody knows if there will be an early election in this country in the next few months and, who knows, if we will return to the previous legislation.

Reasonable sanctions

There are many more novelties to do with the net turnover of surplus energy or the ‘battery tax’ that tried to penalise people for their change in power supply, but the last fundamental axis of the Decree is the arrival of common sense to the sanctioning regime.

With the previous regulation, penalties could reach 60 million euros. Now, with the new Decree, the sanction can never exceed 10% of the consumer's annual bill. This, as the experts agree, also helps to reduce the uncertainty regarding self-consumption facilities and, predictably, facilitate their expansion.

As I have written in previous articles for CBN, the ‘sun tax’ was not a tax in the strictest sense. It was rather a set of measures that sought to discourage self-consumption of energy. And after almost 1,100 days of this ‘tax’ it seems to have worked: in Spain there are barely a thousand self-consumers, compared to the million that exist in Germany.

The government's greatest challenge is not to withdraw the ‘sun tax’, but rather to aid self-consumption effectively. This challenge is even greater given the current unstable political climate. It does not seem easy. Above all because to seriously consider renewable energy requires, most importantly, reforms of the electricity grid. It still remains to be seen, but whatever it may be, this seems to be an extremely good step forward.