According to data from the Energy Regulatory Office (URE), the issue of increasing refusals to connect to the grid is deepening with each passing year. “More than 80GW of connection refusals for renewable energy sources, reported by the URE last year, are more than we currently have installed in the system, so that’s a really big number,” said Pawel Czyzak, an analyst at Ember. According to him, problems with connecting new capacity to the grid are mainly due to its aging structure but are not isolated to Poland. “In the Eastern Europe region infrastructure is older, less digitalized. A large part of this infrastructure is from the communist era and it is simply aging, so countries like Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Poland, are already encountering significant barriers that practically prevent any new capacity from being connected,” says the expert.
According to a report by the URE, in 2023 the number of connection refusals to the distribution and transmission network once again increased, setting a new record. Energy companies negatively assessed 7448 applications for network connection conditions for planned generating units with capacity of 83.6 GW, which means a growth of over 60% y/y. For comparison, according to PSE, the total installed capacity in the National Power System at the end of the previous year was 66.3 GW, of which over 40% (28.3 GW) came from renewable sources.
.Statistics show that the largest number of refusals to issue network connection conditions last year were for investments taking place in the Mazowieckie province (13.4 GW), Zachodniopomorskie (10.2 GW), and Wielkopolskie (9.9 GW). URE data shows that the most common reason for refusals (nearly 3.6 thousand refusals for planned units with a total capacity of 41.8 GW) was the lack of technical connection conditions to the network, due primarily to the overload of medium and high-voltage networks and the lack of available power at main supply points.
According to the President of the URE, the solution to the problem of refusing to issue connection conditions for renewable energy sources to the network and a way to streamline and improve the transparency of this process is its digitization and greater exploitation of commercial connection possibilities.
However, this problem persists not only in Poland. According to a ClientEarth report, across the EU, low-voltage networks aged 20 to 40 years represent an estimated 35-40% of the system. This indicates that substantial investments in upgrading and constructing new networks will not only be faced by Poland but many other EU countries in the years to come.
“Investments in distribution networks are necessary and the volume of these investments will be increasing. Historically, it was about 6 billion PLN annually, but data for the previous year shows that the operators increased these investments to about 12 billion PLN, i.e., essentially doubling the value of investments in distribution networks. That’s a big leap,” says the expert.
According to the Energy Regulatory Office, the problem of an increasing number of refusals to connect to the network continues to deepen each year. In 2022, URE recorded 7,023 refusals to provide conditions for connecting to the network for planned power plants with a capacity of more than 51 GW. For comparison, in 2021, there were 3,751 refusals and 14.45 GW, and in 2020 – 1,322 refusals and 6.2 GW.
