Amendments in the Regulation on License-Exempt Electricity Generation Have Been Introduced

With the Regulation Amending the Regulation on License-Exempt Electricity Generation (“Amendment Regulation”), published in Official Gazette dated 2 March 2023 and numbered 32120, the connection agreement application process was facilitated for the non-accepted facilities that will have an installed power of 1-10 MW, and it has been regulated that a reduction of over 10% can be made from the installed power included in the connection agreement for the facilities for one time only.

Notable amendments introduced with the Amendment Regulation are as follows:

• By amending Article 17 paragraph 1 of the Regulation on Unlicensed Electricity Production in the Electricity Market (“Regulation”), the requirement of application for environmental impact assessment (“EIA”) decision within the 30 days from the service of the call letter was declared off and “receiving the document” within this term in accordance with the EIA Regulation was brought. Thus, the loss of time arising from waiting for the decision in the application process is prevented.
• It has been regulated that if an application is made within 60 days for the production facility that has not yet been accepted as of the date of change, a reduction of more than 10% from the installed power included in the connection agreement and the call letter can made for once.
• It has been regulated that only a single acceptance can be made in license-exempt generation facilities, excluding power increase procedure.
• In the event that a license-exempted electricity generation facility is established over the same measurement point as the licensed generation facilities, the connection and system usage agreements for the relevant license-exempted generation facilities must be zero on the transmitting side. Thus, it is aimed to allocate these license-exempted facilities for self-consumption without supplying electricity to the grid.
• It has been regulated that in case of having production facilities under the jurisdiction of different assigned supplier companies, the offsetting transactions will be implemented as of 01.07.2023. Therefore, if the facilities that are currently in operation transmit energy to the grid, the energy supplied to the system will be considered as a free contribution to Renewable Energy Resources Support Mechanism (YEKDEM) and the system usage fee to be incurred for this amount of energy will be notified to Enerji Piyasaları İşletme Anonim Şirketi (EPİAŞ) by the relevant grid operators.

The full text of the Amendment Regulation is available at this link. (Only available in Turkish)

Tagged with: Moroğlu Arseven, E. Benan Arseven, C. Hazal Baydar, LL.M., Energy & Natural Resources, Enerji