The Polish Energy Regulatory Office (ERO) has announced the final results of its solar and wind auction for projects above 1 MW and another procurement exercise for renewables up to 1 MW in size. The tenders were held on in the first two weeks of December.
In the first of the two auctions, solar accounted for around 570 MW at PLN207.85/MWh ($50.78) and for wind power it was PLN139.64/MW. The ERO had set a ceiling price of PLN320/MWh for solar projects and PLN250/MWh for wind. Approximately 14 TWh of electricity was contracted and around PLN3.2 billion was allocated. The ERO specified that when tariffs of the same value were received, the order in which they were lodged would be decisive, with the earliest offers successful. “This is the result of a large number of submitted offers,” it further explained.
In the second procurement exercise, all of the contracted capacity – around 300 MW – went to PV projects. The lowest bid came in at PLN219/MWh ($53.51) and the highest at PLN278.9/MWh. The ceiling price set by the Polish regulator was PLN340/MWh. Around PLN2.5 billion was allocated for the purchase of 2.7 TWh of energy.
In the last auction for projects over 1 MW, held in June, solar accounted for roughly 1.2 MW of the allocated power. Overall, the ERO allocated approximately 1.5 GW of renewable energy power generation capacity in the auction, including about 300 MW of wind power.
The last procurement exercise for projects not up to 1 MW in size also resulted in PV securing all the allocated capacity of 1 GW.
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Poland has currently an installed PV capacity of more than 6.3 GW. The Polish PV market is expected to grow strongly during the current decade to reach 30 GW of installed capacity by the end of 2030, according to the Polish research institute Instytut Energetyki Odnawialnej (IEO).
The experts also expect the country's cumulative capacity to grow to 10 GW by the end of next year, despite an upcoming market contraction in the distributed generation segment. The upward trend for the solar sector in Poland will be maintained by the utility scale segment that, according to the forecast, will equal the installed capacity of the distributed generation segment at the turn of 2023-2024.
*The headline of the article was amended to reflect that the allocated power is 870 MW, and not 870 GW as we previously reported.
This copy was amended on 03/01/21 to specify how the order in which bids were lodged could prove a decisive factor.
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“solar accounted for around 570 GW of the assigned capacity”
I assume you mean MW.
Is it 870 MW and not 870 GW?
Considering coal’s LCOE is over $113/MWH even where it is plentiful, this should put the nail in the coffin for grid investors worldwide. Burning stuff to spin turbins is 20th century technology.