rec_19

(19) Electricity from renewable sources should be deployed at the lowest possible cost to consumers and taxpayers. When designing support schemes and when allocating support, Member States should seek to minimise the overall system cost of deployment along the decarbonisation pathway towards the objective of a low-carbon economy by the year 2050. Market-based mechanisms, such as tendering procedures, have been demonstrated to reduce support cost effectively in competitive markets in many circumstances. However, in specific circumstances, tendering procedures may not necessarily lead to efficient price discovery. Balanced exemptions may therefore need to be considered to ensure cost-effectiveness and minimise overall support cost. In particular, Member States should be allowed to grant exemptions from tendering procedures and direct marketing to small-scale installations and demonstration projects in order to take into account their more limited capabilities. Since the Commission assesses the compatibility of support for renewable energy with the internal market on a case-by-case basis, such exemptions should comply with the relevant thresholds set out in the latest Commission Guidelines on State aid for environmental protection and energy. In the Guidelines for 2014 to 2020, those thresholds are set at 1 MW (and 6 MW or 6 generation units for wind energy) and 500 kW (and 3 MW or 3 generation units for wind energy) in terms of exemptions from, respectively, tendering procedures and direct marketing. To increase the effectiveness of tendering procedures to minimise overall support costs, tendering procedures should, in principle, be open to all producers of electricity from renewable sources on a non-discriminatory basis. While Member States develop their support schemes, they may limit tendering procedures to specific technologies where this is needed to avoid sub-optimal results with regard to network constraints and grid stability, system integration costs, the need to achieve diversification of the energy mix, and the long-term potential of technologies.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-10-28 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.