A law that should have been passed a long time ago was finally passed yesterday by the Parliament, and unanimously, and now the conditions are being created for the storage of electricity at cost-oriented prices, under the responsibility of the Cyprus Transmission System Operator (TSO).
The new law was made possible after the efforts of the Minister of Energy, George Papanastasiou, who succeeded in convincing the European Commission and his fellow energy ministers in the EU that it was necessary to approve an exception (derogation) for the isolated electricity system of Cyprus, in order to bypass the usual bidding procedures and give the opportunity to, Exceptionally, to the Energy Transmission Operator of Cyprus, to install and manage storage systems, in cooperation with EAC, in order to ensure the stability of the electricity system and at the same time to reduce the risks of not being able to cover electricity consumption and at the same time to reduce the cuts in green energy due to overproduction from photovoltaics.
Yesterday's plenary session was interesting in terms of the approval of the bill, as yesterday's report by the Liberal Party was confirmed, according to which the chairman of the Energy Committee, Kyriakos Hatzigiannis, promoted the amendment of the bill for the adoption of the EU Directive, without securing the majority of the members of the committee, nor the Government.
For the restoration of the bill to its original form, in accordance with the content of the EU Directive, six MPs from AKEL, DIKO and DIAA submitted amendments.
And these amendments were voted for by all parties, even by DISY, whose MP is Kyriakos Hatzigiannis, who had promoted the changes that the vast majority of the Parliament deemed unacceptable and deleted them. Only he and DISY MP Nikos Sykas voted in favour of Hatzigiannis' choices.
After the approval of the amendments (so that the Operator can proceed with state electricity storage), the bill was unanimously approved.
