Serbian Government foresaw subsidies to public companies in the electricity sector in the amount of some 38 million euros in the proposal of the rebalance of the budget for 2020. This is a precedent in the current planning of public finances and according to experts, these subsidies can only be directed to power utility EPS, and the potential reason is the losses due the increased purchase of electricity from renewable energy sources at subsidized prices.
According to consultant Bogdan Petrovic, in order to recover EPS’s finances, it would be necessary to increase the feed-in tariffs, through which renewable energy sources are financed. Either the fee for renewable energy sources will increase or the losses will have to be solved with subsidies. The fee has not been increased so far, and new wind farms, which were approved several years ago, have recently been put into operation. The feed-in tariff has not changed since 2015, while the supply of electricity from privileged producers has increased eight times in that period. Last year, over 105 million euros were paid for the purchase of electricity from privileged producers, while EPS charges 0.074 euros/kWh of electricity sold to end users through feed-in tariffs. Petrovic estimated that EPS will make losses of 120 to 150 million euros annually only due to insufficient revenues from feed-in tariffs.
