In order to encourage investments in renewable power plants, the government increases its buying tariffs.
“We are going to increase tariffs by 30 to 40 percent during peak hours”, says Mohammad Sadeghzadeh, Head of Renewable Energy Organization of Iran. “higher exchange rate has caused difficulties for many investors and they have difficulties to meet 30 percent of their costs. That’s why we are defining new formula for tariffs to keep them encouraged to produce more power during peak hours”.
Currently some power plants sell their electricity to the government at 4900 rials for one Kilowatt-hour. This price reach 6000 rials which will make the return of the investment faster.
Iranian government guarantees to buy the electricity from renewable power plants for twenty years.
Over the past two years, Iran has invested in developing technologies required to build renewable power plants. Producing equipment domestically have saved money to a great extent.
“Buy defining new feed-in-tariffs, we have increased investment in power plants and also reduced construction costs by 2.5 times than before”, says Mr Sadeghzadeh. “While two years ago, construction of each unit of solar power plant needed 1300 euros, now we need only 700 to 600 euros for it”.
He also notes that there are officially three Iranian renewable energy providers that will export electricity to Afghanistan and Iraq.
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