Panel SA: Energy distributors stop granting tax benefit for solar panels

Solar energy companies participating in Cop 27, the UN conference on climate change, will ask President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to extend the deadline set by law for consumers who generate their own energy (by panels) to be able to integrate into the distributors’ system in time to benefit from tax benefits.

The justification for the postponement, according to Absolar, an association that represents the companies, is that Aneel has not yet adapted its regulation to the new milestone in the segment, which deals with microgeneration and distributed minigeneration. Due to the pending situation, the distributors would not be connecting consumers to the network.

This situation means that many of the consumers who have filed approval requests with distributors run the risk of expiry of the term and, therefore, are not covered by tax exemptions provided for by legislation.

Absolar claims that this year it has already accumulated more than 700 complaints from consumers who have not received visits from dealerships to ratify their systems.

“The only item [da lei] The distributors want to keep the deadline is to start, from next year, to charge a toll from the consumer who generates their own energy to be able to inject it into the network, because that’s how the distributor bills”, says Rodrigo Sauaia, president of Absolar.

Therefore, the association will ask Lula to postpone it. The entity supports the bill presented this month by Deputy Celso Russomanno (Republicans-SP), which provides for the addition of another 12 months to the period.

Sought by the SA Panel, Aneel said that “in the approval of public consultation No. 51, of 2022, it emphasized that most of the provisions of Law 14,300 are self-applicable, and therefore do not depend on supplementary regulation by Aneel to be fully effective, not causing harm to consumer-generators and to the regulation of the matter”.

For Sauaia, from Absolar, Aneel’s signaling came late, which harmed the sector and consumers. The public consultation cited by the municipality began this month and will last until the end of December. “Spent the entire year without implementing the good parts [do marco] and now, at the turn of the year, he’ll want to implement the law’s evil package. That’s not justice,” says Sauaia.

During the processing of the bill that defined the rules for micro and minigeneration, Abradee and Abrace, associations representing distributors and large consumers, respectively, stated that the installation of plates is a measure for high-income consumers ( because they require investments).

In addition, they said in the discussions in Congress at the time that these customers withdraw from the distributors’ network with the installation of solar panels and, as a consequence, the costs of the entire electrical system are divided among consumers who cannot to install the infrastructure to produce its own energy. In other words: the electricity bill is more expensive for those who remain in the traditional system.

Julio Wiziack (interim) with Paulo Ricardo Martins and Diego Felix