Czech president Milos Zeman said in a speech to the country's parliament on 7 May that the subsidies made to solar energy 'have been the biggest theft in Czech history' and have stripped the Czech economy of 200 billion crowns. He proposes that a parliamentary commission be created to investigate the whole affair.
Mr Zeman said he considered support for renewable sources of energy in the Czech Republic to be "utterly nonsensical and mad." Czech companies have been stripped of 165 billion crowns, and Czech households a further 35 billion crowns, over the higher price of power he said. Among the prominent companies losing large sums to "unnecessarily overpriced energy", said Mr Zeman, are the Vitkovicke Zelezarny iron works (200 million crowns annually) and Skoda Auto twice as much.
"How [can you talk] here in parliament ... about raising the competitiveness of Czech industry while you are ... decreasing this competitiveness by the nonsensical policy of subsidies?" Zeman asked.
Solar associations have dismissed the labelling of owners of small photovoltaic installations as thieves. They said the core of the problem lies in large power plants being built by the part-state-owned CEZ.
The Alliance for Energy Self-reliance (AliES) and the Czech Photovoltaic Industrial Association (CZEPHO) have also rejected the figures mentioned by Zeman.
"Consumers have by no means paid 200 billion crowns for support to photovoltaic power plants, but a quarter of the sum. And the subsidies to land reclamation where brown coal was mined, gasification or the planned state guarantees for the completion of the Temelin [nuclear] plant are much higher," AliES and CZEPHO said.
They said the high prices of power are not only due to support to renewable sources, but also to distribution fees and the distributors' profits. The difference is reflected in final consumer prices.
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