Hungary

Overall assessment

Hungary’s REPowerEU chapter, one of the amendments to its national recovery and resilience plan, was submitted on 31 August 2023 along with a loan request. The submission followed a two-week consultation that took place in the middle of the summer, thus limiting opportunities for public input.

The plan proposes new reforms in direct or indirect support of energy communities, which are needed to deploy investments made with the support of the EU’s cohesion policy funds and Modernisation Fund. Namely:

• C10.R1: Improving the transparency, predictability and availability of the grid connection procedure: the reforms foresees the harmonization, and acceleration of permitting procedures for renewable energy projects.
• C10.R7: Expanding energy communities: the reform will create a legislative framework to simplify the registration of energy communities, clarify the rules around energy sharing, transmission, access to consumer data, electricity, metering and accounting in the public grid, and facilitate the participation of energy communities in the heating-cooling sector. A dedicated financing scheme is also foreseen to be created. Various awareness raising and training activities around energy communities will be held, and most notably one stop shops will be established to facilitate access to financing and information including guidelines and templated documents for the legal establishment of energy communities. The reform is expected to be completed by June 30, 2024.

Additionally, several reforms are focused on the modernisation and digitalisation of the grid, including by enhancing demand response, so as to facilitate greater penetration of renewables into the electricity mix.

Funding is also foreseen for energy efficiency, but this potential largely remains untapped, in particular for the residential sector.

Moreover, the Hungarian government plans to invest in increasing operational supply security in an existing gas storage facility. There are doubts about the actual potential to decrease gas dependency, as the REPowerEU chapter does not mention this aim anymore, and the objective was reduced in the draft NECP. The deletion of two fossil fuel investments was also recommended in the CSO consultation responses but it is more likely that these were withdrawn due to the Commission’s expectations. It would appear that most of the recommendations by civil society organisations have not been incorporated into the chapter submitted to the Commission