Bosnia and Herzegovina has an excellent resource availability for energy from renewable sources. Although technology improvements over the past decade have led to significant cost decrease for the generation of electricity from these renewable energy sources, the provision of incentives is still essential to stimulate the transformation to clean power generation in BIH.
To avoid excessive subsidies for some technologies a comprehensive reform of the support scheme system for RES based electricity is required.
On behalf of German Government, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) has supported political institutions on the state and entity levels in preparation of the concept proposal for such a reform. In order to facilitate the discussion with the public and to gather feedback on the elaborated suggestions, a first outline has been published on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[1]
The proposal aims at both, reducing renewable energy support cost and facilitating development of renewable energy projects in a fully liberalized electricity sector through the introduction of auctions for renewable energy. For small RES power plants, the existing support system shall remain in place by giving priority to local community-energy initiatives and self-consumers.
With the purpose to jointly discuss the proposed reform of the RES support schemes, the Center for Environment in Banja Luka organized a meeting with other relevant NGOs in the environmental sector and representatives of GIZ to present the proposed concept for the reform. The participants in principal appreciate the proposed reform as it envisages to introduce a transparent mechanism for the efficient allocation of incentives for renewable energy through an auction system and the direct participation of citizens and local communities in the energy transition of BIH.
However, with regard to the definition of detailed incentive designs per size and technology of RES power plants, the participating environmental organizations expressed the need to further discuss and question the incentivization of hydroenergy in general and small hydro power plants in particular, as well as the need to harmonize the administrative procedures for concessions and permits with respective environmental requirements and sustainability criteria. The representatives of the NGOs will closely follow the published proposals and the Ministries website and provide comments and solutions with the aim of improving the proposals.
[1] http://www.mvteo.gov.ba/Content/Read/energetika-javni-pozivi?lang=en
[1] http://www.mvteo.gov.ba/Content/Read/energetika-javni-pozivi?lang=bs