Small Scale Municipal Solar Installations Being Dismantled In Copenhagen Due To Silly Legislation

According to the Danish municipal organisation kommunen.dk a total of 4 relativly new and perfectly functional small scale solar installations on public buildings in Copenhagen are being dismantled right now due to complex and utterly silly regulatory legislation.

Silly legislation

The rules are different for municipal buildings than state owned buildings, and amongst other nifty details, the municipal owners of power generating solar must pay VAT of the electricity used by themselves. That is like paying the government for the right to eat your own apples from your own garden. Crazy!

It is even a requirements that if an installation sells electricity to another institution than your own, it has to be separated into an independent utility company. What? Installations are down to a few kW in size per site. That is bureaucracy of the worst kind.

438 facilities are under pressure, because the originally attractive rules were changed shortly after they were put in action in 2014 due to fear from the government that the announced scheme would be too popular and thus make the state miss out on a lot of taxes. For some institutions it was too late to cancel the installations.

Grotesque situation

It is a grotesque and embarrassing situation for a country like Denmark that has a worldwide reputation of being able to comply effectively to future emission reduction targets.

Despite the criticism and the fact that solar installations are actually physically being put into dark storage rooms, the Danish minister of climate Lars Chr. Lilleholt has no intention of changing the rules.

What is wrong with this picture? We do wind so well, but when it comes to electric vehicles and solar we mess things up.

solcellefasan

Still, it must also be said that on a sunny day in Denmark solar covers up to 10 % of total electricity consumption in the country — my own 4kW installation above included — and something that might restore our reputation is the announcement from Paris today by the Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen — at One Planet Summit with Emmanuel Macron and 50 other world leaders — that Denmark will double its contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC. The prime minister adds: “When Donald Trump turns his back on the climate, the rest of us must stretch to form a ring around the earth.”

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