Record

a. Until the voting of the Law on RES (July 2010)

The Union of Agrinio, in close cooperation with PanHellenic Confederation of Agricultural Cooperatives Union (hereafter PASEGES), supported and spearheaded the efforts that were made, before the adoption of the law of RES, to ensure the participation of farmers in green growth.

The dominant reason for the involvement of farmers in RES was the need to find alternative - additional income for the affected tobacco farmers of the Perfecture.

The final version of the Law initially prioritized the examination of the farmers’ requests, which proved to be extremely important, taking into consideration the intake problems of the produced power by the Public Power Corporation (hereafter PPC), as a main power receptor. This afore-mentioned priority in examining the farmers’ requests was active until 11 October 2010.

The pre-existing restrictions concerned both the power: restricting farmers to apply for no more than 100kW power generating stations, and secondly the transfer of the facilities’ exploitation rights, which predicted a minimum period of five years from the opening of the facilities until the station could be transferred to a private owner.

 b. After the publication of the Law on RES (July 2010)

Immediately after the voting of the Law in July 2010 the preparation began for the submission of requests to the PPC.

Workshops - presentations were organized, in cooperation with PASEGES, in order to inform producers about the possibility to invest in Renewable Energy Sources.

A specially staffed office was created, operating on an overtime daily basis, both to inform and collect the necessary documents for the preparation of the dossier to-be submitted to the PPC.

They created teams of properly trained staff to run suitability checks on the pieces of land concerned. There were a total of more than 1000 pieces of land checked in the Prefecture.

As a result, at the first day of receiving requests from the PPC, in early September, the Union was ready to submit requests, on behalf of 200 farmers - investors. Until 11/10 2010 there were more than 550 requests submitted. The interest remained big, until the Union gradually seized accepting new applications as it was now clear that the existing electricity network was unable to absorb extra power. Otherwise it is certain that requests would have been more than 1,000.