Only 260,000 EUR was paid to privileged producers of electricity from renewable sources (RES) this year, due to the fact that the market price of electricity was higher than the incentive price for most of them.
Until this year, except for a few exceptions last year, the market prices were always lower than the incentives, so the privileged producers, 26 of them, received multi-million sums based on incentives on an annual basis.
Incentives are paid by citizens and the economy through the electricity bill, item OIE2, while the Government annually allocated money from the budget for item OIE1, and recently transferred it to Elektroprivreda (EPCG). In the beginning, citizens and businesses paid for everything through electricity bills.
According to the data of the Montenegrin Electricity Market Operator (COTEE), 291.66 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity were produced in eight months, the market value of which is EUR 33.08 million.
The incentive value for eight months was less than the market value and amounted to EUR 30.9 million, that is, the privileged producers received EUR 2.2 million less through the incentive system than would have been the case if they had entered the market.
COTEE and EPCG purchase electricity from producers at subsidized prices.
Therefore, out of the currently 23 privileged producers (three have left the incentive system), 11 of them had a price lower than the market price and therefore received incentives from COTEE.
