By: Jim RyanThe much-anticipated new Electricity Law was finally unveiled last week by Minister Dobles of MINAS at a ceremony at the Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (Central American Bank of Economic Integration).
In so doing Minister Dobles created a dramatically new paradigm for the Costa Rican energy market. The proposed Law would shift us away from our current ICE dominated monopoly structure and toward a more transparent and competitive electricity market, with a special emphasis on accelerating the growth of renewable energy.
The Law gives supporters of both competitive markets and renewable energy much to cheer about, and finally addresses the schizophrenia of a government on the one hand pursuing carbon neutrality, but on the other hand adding polluting oil fired power plants at an alarming pace.
Specifically, the Law intends to:
- Exploit the development of competitive characteristic in the industry.
- Create a strong investment climate for the power industry.
- Promote renewable energy as the model for national development.
These objectives are supported by far-reaching proposals for structural changes to the entire electricity market, including provisions for creating new regulatory and market governance entities to oversee a competitive wholesale market, whereby private generators can sell their energy directly to regional distributors or large energy consuming companies.
More important to business and homeowners, they are provided grid-connection rights and the ability to sell excess power back to the grid when their renewable energy system (solar panels, wind turbine, micro-hydro or agricultural biogas/methane system) generates more electricity than they are currently consuming. And their investment can be exonerated of sales taxes!
Together with other details of the new Law, these provisions promoting renewable energy are HUGE!
There is still much work to do before this Law is enacted and all the fine details are defined in various decrees and regulations to come, but our nation's potential to truly be carbon neutral, and to overcome our recent addiction to oil, is now clearly defined with a comprehensive legal basis.This is HUGE!
As a signal that times are truly changing, this week our company had the first indication from ICE that they could indeed approve a proposed project using animal manure to produce
methane biogas in order of fuel a power generator connected to ICE's distribution network. In concept they have even approved the option for us to either sell them the power or to 'wheel' it to another location. If successful this will be the first such project in the country exporting power into ICE, but not the last we expect.This is a HUGE beginning!
Those of us that have long been advocating for the types of self-enlightened policies this Law contains should all express appreciation to the government officials that have worked diligently and taken risks to create this new regime. Now we must support them to actually place the Law in force, and to accompany it with reasonable operating procedures in order to make soon its HUGE potential a reality.
Development- Services 
