Renewables, new incentives coming: here's what the impact on your bill could be

The European Commission has approved in recent days the new Fer2 decree that incentivises the construction of renewable energy production plants that are not fully mature or have high operating costs. But the OK has raised an immediate fuss related to the cost, quantified by Brussels itself as €35.3 billion, of the incentives for this type of technology, starting with offshore wind (to which the bulk of the resources provided by the measure are allocated). It is therefore a good idea to shed some light on the expected impact on our bills, which will in any case not come quickly but only when the decree begins to take effect, i.e. not before 2029.

Let us start by recalling first of all that the reverberation on utility bills connected to renewables incentive mechanisms is nothing new. And this is because our bills already include the costs of existing mechanisms, some of which will expire in the coming years as incentives that have been in place for a long time and have practically reached the end of their life. These incentives are paid for in the bill through general system charges - and, in particular, by the Asos component - through which the costs for activities of general interest for the national electricity system are financed.

Coming to the new decree, therefore, it is first of all necessary to clarify that that threshold, indicated by Brussels, represents a maximum bar, also because the real cost to be incurred to finance those incentives will vary depending on the future energy prices. Why? The answer lies in the very mechanism by which the green sources listed in the decree will be remunerated, which are, in addition to offshore wind, floating photovoltaics and thermodynamic solar, but also plants powered by tidal, wave and other forms of marine energy, as well as biomass and biogas.

The aid envisaged by the decree will be disbursed by means of a two-way contract for the difference per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced and fed into the grid and will be ensured for a duration equal to the useful life of the power plants (25 years, for example, for offshore wind farms). In practice, the Gse, director of the incentives, will calculate the difference between the due tariff (which varies depending on the technology considered) and the hourly zonal electricity price (i.e. the price of electricity at the time when the feed-in to the grid takes place and in the market area where the plant is located): if positive, the Gse will disburse the incentives by applying a premium tariff equal to this difference; if negative, it will proceed with the adjustment or request the corresponding amounts from the subject.

It will therefore be necessary to take into account a series of variables to understand what the final impact on the state coffers of the incentives covered by Fer2 will be and, consequently, the reflection in the bill. The 35.3 billion must therefore be considered as a maximum level distributed, it is worth remembering, over 20 years (the estimated useful life of the plants). Ergo: for each year, the outlay will be around 1.85 billion, assuming that maximum level is reached.