Sweden to devote another $30.8 million to PV rebates for homeowners

The Swedish government has announced it intends to allocate another SEK260 million ($30.6 million) to support homeowners in deploying residential PV systems under the country’s solar rebate scheme for rooftop solar.

The new budget, which would be available only for private citizens, is intended at meeting the stronger than expected requests for the subsidy registered for the rebate scheme until the end of last year, when the program expired. On the other hand, the government had already allocated an additional SEK260 million for municipalities and businesses in December.

“This is great news and shows that the Swedish government has the ability of steering speed,” Anna Werner, CEO of the Swedish solar energy association, Svensk Solenergi, told pv magazine. “The government’s message is, sadly, vaguely worded, though. We do not yet know how many people … will receive the compensation.” 

Werner specified, it is not known, yet, the level of the compensation. In the latest program’s round, rebates for a proportion of the cost of buying and installing PV systems ranged from 10-20%.

“Svensk Solenergi has contact with the ministry and tries to help them make a generous, yet waterproof decision,” the CEO further explained. “Relative to everything else, this is a small amount of money for the state but makes a big difference for the private individuals who are affected and, of course, no one should fall between two support systems in the way that happened last autumn.”

The government also recalled that, at the beginning of the year, it introduced a tax break for labor and material costs associated with the deployment of small sized solar, storage and charging points for electric vehicles.

The Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten) has devoted around SEK4.8 billion to the solar rebate program for the 2009-21 period. The agency said in June that Sweden’s operational PV capacity increased from 689 MW at the end of 2019 to 1 GW at the end of 2020. In March, it revealed that solar generation will likely surge in the 2018-22 period, in line with an anticipated rise in wind power output.