TEHRAN - Iran's Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Organization (known as SATBA) has started a program for offering rooftop photovoltaic power stations (known as PV systems) to high-consuming electricity subscribers, an official with the organization announced.

According to Mohammad-Taqi Ziari, high-consuming applicants can visit SATBA website to register in the mentioned program and will be able to pay for the mentioned systems in installments, IRNA reported.

Ziari noted that the program will be implemented in one province as the pilot.

He put the price of one rooftop power station at 150 million rials (about $3,500), adding that each high-consuming household will receive a PV system with a capacity of 600-700 watts.

Managing electricity consumption by various sectors including households, agriculture, and industry, and reducing the consumption of fossil fuels used by power plants has become one of the major priorities for the government in recent years.

Back in August, Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian had said that his ministry prepared two programs for managing high-consuming electricity subscribers and to encourage them to join the low-consumer group.

The first program was to offer a training course to teach consumption management methods with the help of knowledge-based companies and start-ups, while the second plan was to offer solar panels to high-consuming subscribers so that such households would meet their electricity needs by installing these PV stations.

Earlier this year, the Energy Ministry spokesman for the electricity sector, Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, had told Tehran Times that the ministry’s specialists and experts defined different packages for different sectors to manage the country’s electricity consumption.

According to the official, since households account for the majority of the electricity consumption in urban areas, the main part of the Energy Ministry’s programs is focused on encouraging the households in metropolitan areas like Tehran to reduce their consumption in peak hours.

In a recently-implemented program, the Energy Ministry awards low-consuming electricity subscribers with a 100 percent discount on their bills.

EF/MA