Economical Analysis of Financial Supports for Large-Scale Photovoltaic PV plants in Eastern Europeen Union Countries

Today, photovoltaic (PV) attracts considerable interest among renewable energy sources (RES), because of its potential to significantly contribute to the future of clean energies. However, PV development is strongly related to the support policies introduced by national governments. The modification or fading out of such support schemes can strongly influence the development of the PV market in any given country. Although the PV market in European developing countries is still quite small, it has been growing rapidly in recent years. Until 2006, the installation of small off-grid PV plants prevailed in eastern EU countries. Starting from 2008, large-scale on-grid PV plants have been put into effect. Today on-grid installations constitute more than 95% of the total installed PV plants. The large increase of PV market in the last two years is a consequence of the enormous development of PV sector in the Czech market, stimulated by effective support mechanisms. Other developing member states, such as Slovakia and Bulgaria, have adequate PV support schemes including, in particular, effective Feed-in Tariff (FIT) systems. Other support mechanisms are tradable green certificates (TGCs), capital subsidies, tax credit and net metering. In this paper, after a brief review of national support policies in PV technology in the considered EU developing countries, the authors perform an economic analysis of the main support mechanisms that are implemented in these countries. The comparative analysis is based on the calculation of the cash flow, the Net Present Value (NPV) and the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) indices. The analysis shows that in some situations, support policies can be inconvenient for the owner of the PV system and that, in many cases, the differences between the implementation of the same support policy in different countries, can give rise to significantly different results. The comparative analysis carried out in this work could help: to evaluate the impact of the PV energy measures in eastern EU member states; to gain an insight into green energy companies by identifying potential PV markets and investigating the policy landscape across eastern EU countries.