Filenews 31 January 2025
Following his meeting yesterday with SEK's leadership, Energy Minister George Papanastasiou announced the start of next Monday of the application period for the first plan of the Ministry of Energy concerning the conversion of photovoltaic parks into hybrids, i.e. for the installation of batteries, with the aim of storing energy coming from RES.
He pointed out that other plans of the Ministry will follow "in order to put storage in substations, to put storage in dispersion within the network, so that we store as much energy as comes from RES".
Explaining how hybrid parks will work, Papanastasiou said that today a photovoltaic park produces electricity and feeds it into the transmission network and "in order to become a hybrid you have to put a battery between production and the grid to charge it" and thus have stored electricity, when the grid will need it and the park will not produce.
In relation to the question that is publicly raised, why under the conditions that Cyprus is today we reject energy that comes from RES, Mr. Papanastasiou said that "the reason is because our production is more than our consumption". He noted that "in a small market where electricity consumption is limited, due to specific weather conditions" – for example we don't have enough heating now because we don't need to, we don't have cooling and we don't have heavy industry, so "we have production from conventional plants and a lot of production from many renewables".
"With this logic you reject those that are technically easy, which are renewables," but this "is not correct, because you had to switch off conventional power generation, which is expensive," he added.
He said that "with this logic, the current Government has decided that it will subsidize storage in order to extend the use of electricity coming from RES for another few hours."
