Owners of residential solar PV systems in Austria will receive €0.0791 per kWh for power surplus in 2018. A residential PV system installed in Austria by GW Energie. Image: GW Energie The Austrian government announced in late December that PV systems up to 200 kW installed under the FIT scheme will be entitled to receive a tariff of €0.0791 per kWh in 2018. It added that the FIT will drop to €0.0767 per kWh in 2019. Overall, OeMAG, which is privately owned and entrusted with the public service obligation of buying all renewable electricity and selling it, has allocated around €8 million for the 2018 FIT program. Project developers must send their application starting from January 9. As FITs will be prioritized for self-consumption projects, the applications will be ranked according to the self-consumption rate of the installations and, in the case of applications with the same rate, on a first-come-first-served basis. Only the specified percentage of the injected electricity will be reimbursed under the newly launched scheme. So, with 80% solar self-consumption, there is compensation for 20%. In addition to the incentives represented by the FIT, there is a second funding pot in Austria, which tops €15 million for this year. It includes a rebate for PV systems, as well as electricity storage. Of these funds, €9 million will be devoted to solar rebates, while the remaining amount will be used to promote the use of storage systems. The rebate amount for PV systems is also fixed. For plants up to 100 kW, there are rebates totaling €250 per kW of installed power. Larger plants, meanwhile, receive €200 per kW installed. However, the subsidy is capped at a maximum of 30% of the buying cost of the PV system, which should be no larger than 500 kW.
The Austrian government has set a feed-in-tariff (FIT) for solar systems up to 200 kWh of €0.0791 per kWh for 2018, falling to €0.0767 per kWh next year. In the first half of 2017, the FIT was reduced by 50 percent from its previous level, but it will be increased again in 2018. Abwicklungsstelle für Ökostrom, which is mandated by the government to buy all renewable electricity and sell it, has set aside €8m ($9.5m) to cover the costs of the 2018 scheme.