The National Assembly of the Republika Srpska has adopted a new Law on Renewable Energy Sources, which introduces new ways of encouraging the production of energy from renewable sources, and enables citizens to produce renewable energy for their own needs. The new system of incentives for renewable energy projects is based on auctions, which means that for each new project, an auction or tender will be announced in which all received bids will be evaluated. The auction system is not envisaged for small hydropower plants, which means that they will not be subject to consideration and incentives.
In the process of public consultations on the Draft Law, the Center for Environment and members of the largest ecological network Eco BiH organizations submitted remarks, suggestions and comments, many of which were respected and included in the final proposal of this law. The biggest success is the abolition of incentives for small hydropower plants with more than 150 kW, and limiting incentives for micro hydropower plants for which there was a counter-initiative to increase that capacity to 500 kW, which is one of the recommendations of the Energy Community.
“We are proud of the success we have achieved in limiting the incentives for hydropower plants to those micro plants up to 150 kW, and we are even more proud of the fact that larger plants from 150 kW to 10 MW will not be subject to incentives. Thus, we have made a great contribution to stopping the onslaught of construction and further narrowed the space for small hydropower projects. In addition, we insisted that greater rights and opportunities be provided for “civil energy” projects, so that customers-producers as well as renewable energy communities were significantly recognized in this Law for the first time. Only now can we say that we have opened the door so that citizens who have the opportunity and want to produce energy for their own needs, can do so without too many administrative and financial difficulties, which has been very discouraging so far. We believe that the River Keepers campaign and the adoption of the Declaration on River Protection in the Republika Srpska have contributed to this outcome, “said Viktor Bjelić from the Center for Environment.