Polish energy company Tauron plans to increase capital expenditures on power grids to PLN3bn in 2024, a threefold increase on 2010, to fund the installation of 600,000 smart meters.

The money will also be used to connect new customers, including renewable energy sources (RES), and modernise and reconstruct power grids.

In the past eight years, Tauron has invested PLN16bn in distribution networks. Completed projects, which consist of almost 60,000 investment tasks per year, allow for the development of networks at all voltage levels and throughout the entire area of the group’s operation.

“Distribution is our most important investment direction, and the planned significant increase in expenditures is a response to the growing needs in terms of connecting new customers and new energy sources to the grid,” said Paweł Szczeszek, Tauron president. “Without the reconstruction of the grid, regardless of how much energy we produce from RES, the power system will not function effectively. The success of the energy transformation is therefore conditioned by the development and modernisation of distribution networks in the direction of the so-called smart grids. In this context, the ideas regarding the separation of distribution companies from energy groups have no business justification, they are even very dangerous from the point of view of the country’s energy security.”

The extra money will increase the number of potential new customers to approximately 50,000. In recent years, on average, the company has connected to its network about 40,000 new customers a year. Since 2016, the number of customers of Tauron Dystrybucja has increased by 360,000.

The increased funds will also translate into the modernisation of 1220km of power lines, the expansion of 345 transformer stations, and the installation of 600,000 smart meters.

Currently, Tauron has more than a million modern remote-reading meters installed, and by 2030 the replacement of meters will cover the entire area of the company’s operation. The smart meters give  customers access to a large package of knowledge about their energy use and the ability to manage consumption.

“Tauron is steadily developing the south of Poland, investing not only in metropolises, but also far from large cities,” said Szczeszek. “Without these investments, small towns would remain on the periphery of development. We look at Poland as a whole, and not in a concentric model, seeing only large cities. Thanks to the actions of the government in the era of the energy crisis, Poles have stable access to energy at socially acceptable prices. The Polish government has frozen energy prices at the level of those in 2022 and introduced a maximum price. These actions stabilised the situation and saved us from the drama of energy poverty. If not for these actions, the bills of a typical Polish family would be higher by an average of PLN5000 a year.”

On RES, 700 large installations and over 400,000 households operate on Tauron’s power grid, including micro-installations with a total capacity of 3GW. In 2016, there were 5000 micro-installations and 360 large RES installations on the network.

However, in some places, the network can no longer accept further large generation sources and all DSOs in Poland have problems of this kind. The current power grid was not designed and built for cooperation with many unstable power sources. Distribution network operators are therefore facing problems related to increasing flexibility, implementing information systems, and the mass replacement of meters with smart meters.

In 2022, Tauron issued over 700 connection contracts for generation sources for a total capacity of approximately 4000MW. These are new, potential RES installations that may be built in the coming years.

Only about half of the connection applications result in agreements and installations. This means some submit applications in several locations, only checking the connection possibilities without the intention of building such sources in all these places.

Each refusal to issue connections for investors results from the analysis of the technical possibilities of connecting the source to the grid. Each requested potential location is always carefully checked in terms of the impact of the planned source on the quality parameters of the distributed electricity, as well as the possibility of generating the requested power.