The Austrian government today launched a €36 million rebate program for small solar-plus-storage installations. Two-thirds of the pot will subsidize rooftop PV with €12 million for energy storage.
The scheme is being administered by the OeMAG energy agency and offers homeowners €250 per kilowatt of solar rooftop generation capacity and €200 per kilowatt-hour of storage. Solar systems with a capacity of up to 500 kW can apply for the rebate, alongside storage units of up to 60 MWh.
Austrian solar association the PVA estimates the funds should drive deployment of 100 MW of solar capacity and 60 MWh of storage.
Italy
A few hundred kilometers away – across a partially closed border – the regional government of Lombardy, in northern Italy, has allocated €10 million for a similar scheme aimed at public bodies.
In Lombardy, state and regional entities can apply for a 50% rebate on the purchase price of solar-plus-storage systems or the entire cost of storage systems bought to be installed alongside operational solar arrays. A maximum grant of €100,000 is available to each applicant.
The regional government has subsidized residential and commercial energy storage systems bought to be linked with already-installed solar arrays since 2016, when the budget was €2 million. That figure doubled in 2017, fell to €3 million for last year and was increased to €4.4 million in June for grants allocated last year and this.
National renewables association ANIE Rinnovabili estimated Italy had 18,036 renewables-linked storage systems at the end of March, with a combined capacity of 80.2 MW and storage volume of 167.7 MWh. Of those, some 11.2 MW/20.6 MWh were reportedly added in the first quarter of last year. Around 93% of the systems were based on lithium-ion batteries and 99% of them had a storage capacity of less than 20 kWh.
