Industry body warns of investment freeze in Polish renewables from proposed grid laws
The proposed new regulations are enshrined in a draft amendment to Poland’s energy laws, known as Project UC84. This proposes raising the advance payment for grid connection fees to PLN60 (US$16.50) per kilowatt of capacity and introducing a requirement for “financial security” of PLN30/kW for the first 100MW and PLN60/kW for capacity above this threshold.
But the proposed change that PSFiME described as the “most controversial” was the imposition of a non-refundable fee for processing applications to determine connection conditions, set at PLN1/kW of connection capacity and not exceeding PLN100,000. PSFiME said the drafters of the legislation had not demonstrated how this fee would improve the efficiency of application processing.
“The proposals in the draft lead to a drastic increase in the ‘entry threshold’ for the market while shifting the entire financial burden of planning and capacity reservation onto investors,” PSFiME said in a statement on the legislation.
“The scale of these changes means an immediate capital commitment of between PLN8.9 and 13.3 billion,” added Ewa Magiera, president of the trade body. “These are amounts the industry has never had to allocate at such an early stage of project development—especially since investors have already invested approximately PLN3-4 billion in advance payments. In practice, only entities with easy access to large financing—state-owned companies and major foreign corporations—will be able to meet these requirements.”
Projects at risk
Poland’s solar market has been one of Europe’s star performers in recent years, with a prosumer installation boom evolving into an expanding utility-scale market. Growing grid pressures have brought energy storage into the frame, with developers eyeing opportunities for standalone battery energy storage systems or hybrid solar-plus-storage systems. SolarPower Europe’s latest Europe market outlook report said that if Poland could navigate bottlenecks such as grid availability and permitting, it could consolidate its position as one of Europe’s leading markets in the coming years.
But PSFiME said the proposed legislation risked putting a large swathe of projects in jeopardy.
Based on data from Poland’s transmission system operation, PSFiME calculated that private investors hold 70% of existing connections for renewable energy projects in the country, amounting to 145GW in total capacity. The remaining portion is held by state-owned energy companies.
PSFiME said the new regulations would force private investors to freeze billions of złoty in capital immediately, “without any guarantee of success”.
The organisation highlighted how the development model for RES projects relies on phased financing rather than one-time payments.
“In this model, no one in Europe reserves billions of PLN ‘just in case’ at the beginning of the process,” said Magiera. “This is not only economically unjustified but also technically impossible. Project UC84 completely ignores these realities, imposing a scenario on the industry that cannot be fulfilled.”
The consequence of the proposed new regulations, PSFiME said, would be the “elimination of entities that lack substantial, immediate financial liquidity”.
“As a result, the only beneficiaries of the changes may be the largest energy groups and major foreign corporations. However, their involvement in developing new RES projects is limited and uneven, raising questions about the pace of Poland’s energy transition,” the body said.
UC84 has been adopted by Poland’s Council of Ministers, but it is awaiting final sign-off before becoming law. It is understood that discussions on the legislation’s final shape are still ongoing.