Benefits of solar power plants – electricity produced in gardens used at home

Since now on, the geographic location of the production of solar electricity is no longer relevant. Residents or businesses can generate electricity not only on the roof of their home or office, but also, say, in their gardens, and use the electricity produced at home, or enterprises may generate electricity in their own land plots outside the city, and use it in their offices. Several persons will be able to use electricity generated by a single solar plant. 

These amendments are also relevant for residents of multi-apartment buildings, who will be able to use electricity produced in solar plants set up, say, in their homesteads or own land plots. Simply put, electricity may be produced in a garden and used in an apartment, a multi- apartment building or distributed.

Let’s say a resident has a 10-kilowatt (kW) power plant set up in his garden. The electricity produced in it may be distributed in the following way: 2 kW - for a garden house and 8 kW - for an apartment. This means that 80% of the electricity supplied to the network will be attributed to the apartment and the rest - to the garden house.

“It should be noted that having decided to produce electricity from renewable sources, an electricity consumer, whether it is a legal or a natural person, will first of all produce electricity for himself. He must not only be the owner of property, but also an electricity consumer. If a person builds a power plant, but does not use it himself, selling electricity to others, this will be considered a commercial activity and will require a permission from the National Energy Regulatory Council (VERT)”, says Renaldas Radvila, Head of the Service Department at ESO. 

The installation of, say, a solar plant, requires accurate calculations of electricity, which will be needed for own needs, because having generated a surplus, it will temporarily be stored in ESO’s electricity network. Generating consumers will be able to “recover” electricity from the network whenever they want, but will not be able to move the accumulated amount of electricity from one object to another. 

“In the summer, residents will be able to use the total amount of the produced electricity, directing a small portion thereof to ESO networks only, and will be able to recover the “accumulated” amount in the fall or the winter, when lower amounts of electricity are produced in the solar power plant. A set fee for the use of electricity networks will be paid for recovering electricity from the distribution network, or settlements will be done in one of the 4 settlement methods”, says Renaldas Radvila, Head of the Service Department at ESO.

Both natural and legal entities willing to become generating consumers may have power plants up to 500 kW installed as from 1 October of this year, while power plants with the capacity of up to 30 kW can be set up in a simplified procedure. A VERT’s permit for expansion, a certificate on technical condition or a production permit are no longer necessary therefor. 

All is needed is to know the exact address and the object number where a solar power plant is to be installed. Each customer can acquire all the necessary documents having connected to the eso.lt self-service portal. 

For more information, call toll-free ESO line 1852.