Commercial battery storage units in Ireland will now be required to pay a levy charged to all electricity customers to support renewable energy generation, the country’s Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU) has announced.
The CRU said the Public Service Obligation (PSO) levy will only be imposed on commercial storage units based on their “house load” when offline, rather than on the total amount of electricity imported from the grid, stored, and then exported.
As battery storage units take electricity from the grid when there is surplus generation, store it, and then feed electricity back to the grid in profitable peak demand periods, there had been uncertainty over whether they should be subject to the levy. The levy is normally imposed on electricity customers who are supplied with electricity at a single site for consumption on those premises.
However, a CRU information paper said that while commercial storage units should be subject to the PSO levy, this should only be due in relation to electricity consumed on the premises, and calculated when the unit is offline. Electricity consumed as part of the import-export process will not count towards the house load and the levy.
Now utility operators will have to “develop, document and publish procedures” as to how the levy on battery units will be calculated and administered, the CRU said.
