Hungarian solar PV applicants who missed the autumn deadline will have to wait a long time to be connected to the grid

Attila Steiner stated that "we would like to create the conditions for the grid to be able to accommodate as many solar panels as possible", but in order to do this, grid upgrades must be done first. The reason for this, he said, is that the installed solar - i.e. weather-dependent - capacity has already reached 4,000 MW, which is already twice the capacity of the Paks nuclear power plant.

Once the grid upgrades are completed, the moratorium on feed-in will be reviewed and it will be possible to feed solar energy back into the grid.

The short deadline put considerable pressure on applicants in the autumn months. In November, E.ON told news channel RTL that between 13 October and 31 October, it received 71,000 new solar applications, which is nearly 80% of its current 87,000 operating residential solar systems. To put this figure in even more context, it is worth remembering that in the first nine months of the year, a total of just over 25,000 household-scale solar systems (HMKE) were installed in the country. After more than a decade of growth, this brings the total to around 160,000. In parallel, OPUS TITÁSZ has received nearly 13,000 new applications since the announcement, 27 times the number of claims received in an average month.

According to Steiner, "the whole network needs to be reviewed and made more resilient" and, E.On Hungária's recent network development project is also about this. The E.ON Hungária group is launching a HUF 74 billion network development project (half from its own resources and half from RRF), pre-financed by the Hungarian government.

By 2026, more than 15,000 small and large network development projects will be implemented in E.ON Hungária's supply area, in Transdanubia and in most of Pest county, resulting in 726 megawatts of additional capacity to be connected to the electricity grid.

Steiner practically bypassed the question of how long to wait for the aforementioned review, saying only that E.On's project allows for 800 MW of additional capacity to be connected, but that this will have to be continuously re-evaluated.

To increase grid resilience, there will also be a battery support programme, where "large batteries will be quickly connected to the grid to enable more renewable projects to feed into the grid," he said, adding that major improvements are also needed on the base-load side to meet industrial-scale demand.

Asked whether these developments were necessary because of the location of the battery factories, the State Secretary replied that

There is no green transition without batteries. This is a priority area for Hungary, which can also be linked into a new value chain, and of course these factories also have energy requirements. We are trying to meet these from as much green energy as possible.

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