If the idea of becoming a prosumer appeals to you but you don't know where to start, you're in the right place!
Being a prosumer is not too complicated, but let's clear up some of the doubts prosumers have and look at a few details that characterise this form of citizen participation in the electricity market.
To take part and start producing electricity, you need to become a prosumer, or “customer-producer”, which is the official name of the legal category introduced precisely for this purpose.
Prosumers use the electricity they produce for their own needs, and the surpluses that arise when production exceeds consumption are sent to the distribution grid, which acts as a virtual battery. They use these surpluses later, when they need more electricity than they can produce.
A customer-producer is an end customer who has connected their own facility for producing electricity from renewable sources to their internal installation. The electricity produced covers their own consumption, and the surplus is delivered to the distribution system.
Being a prosumer in Serbia can be very profitable.
- You will achieve long-term savings on your electricity bill (for at least the next 25 years),
- You will protect yourself from electricity price hikes for part of your own consumption,
- You will partly reduce your dependence on Elektroprivreda Srbije.
You can save even more on building a solar power plant if you use the subsidies available to you.
Recently it has become clear that electricity prices cannot be kept this low, which is why prices were raised three times between December 2022 and October 2023. This trend will certainly continue (another 8% increase in May 2024), which makes a solar power plant one of the ways to protect yourself from future electricity price hikes.
The key characteristics of a customer-producer are:
- A customer-producer is an end customer. Each of us is an end customer of electricity, and that does not change when you become a prosumer. You remain connected to the distribution grid like all other electricity consumers. This is necessary, because it is practically impossible to cover constant consumption only from your own renewable power plant. Renewable sources are variable and depend on the weather, sunshine, wind, the season and so on.
- The power plant is connected to your own installation, so that the electricity produced is used immediately for active consumption, while surpluses that are not used in real time are sent to the grid. Connecting the power plant to your own installation is the key difference between an “electricity producer” and a “customer-producer”, and it is directly linked to the very concept of a prosumer.
- Surplus electricity is delivered to the distribution system. If you have a solar power plant, you will obviously produce much more electricity in summer than in winter, because the days are longer and the sky is much clearer than in the cold months. You will of course still produce electricity in winter, but most of it will be generated in the sunniest months of the year, from April to November.
Surpluses arise when current production is higher than current consumption. The solar system automatically sends surpluses to the grid (the virtual battery), where they are recorded as a kind of credit and used in the following months to reduce the number of kilowatt-hours you draw from the grid. Surpluses can be drawn from the grid only in the same tariff in which they were delivered, which for a solar power plant means the higher (daytime) tariff if you have dual-tariff metering. If you have single-tariff metering, you can draw surpluses at any time of day, since a single tariff applies to you. The kilowatt-hour credit can be carried over from 1 April of the current year until the end of the settlement period, 31 March of the following year. After that, the surpluses stay in the system and, under current legislation, there is no compensation for unused surpluses.
It is also important to keep in mind that, because of the way bills are calculated, surpluses also have a certain price when you draw them from the grid.
Price of drawing surpluses from the grid:
- 3.879 dinars (network charge, i.e. the fee for access to the distribution system)
- + 7.5% (excise duty)
- + 20% (value added tax)
TOTAL: 5.02 dinars per kilowatt-hour
It is best to use all the electricity immediately, at the moment you produce it.
You can reduce surpluses by matching production and consumption: use electricity when there is the most of it, which is during the day.
When you manage production and consumption well, you will cut your electricity bill as much as possible and shorten the payback period of your solar power plant.
Source: prozjumer.rs (in Serbian)
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We guide you through the whole process of signing a prosumer contract, so that you can hand your surplus electricity to EPS for storage and later use it to reduce your electricity bills. To learn more about the prosumer model in advance, see the official brochure of the Center for the Advancement of the Environment (in Serbian).
