{"id":504,"date":"2026-07-11T06:28:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T06:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blog.gridlink.pl\/?p=504"},"modified":"2026-07-12T16:32:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T16:32:57","slug":"uokik-may-need-years-your-curtailment-evidence-has-weeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog.gridlink.pl\/index.php\/2026\/07\/11\/uokik-may-need-years-your-curtailment-evidence-has-weeks\/","title":{"rendered":"Poland\u2019s Competition Authority may need years. Your curtailment evidence has weeks."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If you own or advise on renewable assets in Poland that were curtailed this year, the size of the claim you can still recover is being decided right now inside your own control room. A single wind or solar asset curtailed on a handful of days can already carry a claim worth six figures in euro.<\/p>\n\n

Whether you ever collect it comes down to one number: how many days of raw SCADA system telemetry you still hold before your historian overwrites the only proof of what your asset lost and when. Poland\u2019s competition authority may need years to rule on whether the operator discriminated. Your retention window is measured in weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

Two clocks are running on every MW your portfolio lost this year, and only one of them is yours to control. The first belongs to Poland\u2019s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), and it could take years. The second belongs to your SCADA historian, and it moves fast. That second clock is the one that decides whether you, specifically, ever see compensation.<\/p>\n\n

UOKiK opened a preliminary inquiry, a post\u0119powanie wyja\u015bniaj\u0105ce<\/em>, into the operator\u2019s non-market curtailment of renewables. It made the case public on 4 March 2026, after three producers reported that their installations were curtailed more often than others without adequate justification. Even if that inquiry escalates into a full antitrust proceeding and finds that the operator discriminated, the ruling will settle a question of principle. It will not tell you how many MWh your specific assets lost, on which days, at which nodes.<\/p>\n\n

Your SCADA historian system works to a different schedule, and it is the only record you actually control. Most systems do not hold raw telemetry indefinitely. It gets overwritten or aggregated on a timeline most operators never track until the data is already gone. Once that window closes, the only surviving version of events belongs to your counterparties. The operator issues the curtailment instruction, and your DSO typically executes and logs it at the connection point, so two parties hold a record that you do not.<\/p>\n\n

What UOKiK actually opened<\/h2>\n\n

Precision matters here, because your investment committee or legal counsel will check it. As of mid-2026, UOKiK has opened a post\u0119powanie wyja\u015bniaj\u0105ce<\/em>, a preliminary explanatory inquiry, into whether the operator\u2019s curtailment instructions were applied proportionally and without discrimination. This is the fact-finding stage that comes before any formal antitrust proceeding, the post\u0119powanie antymonopolowe<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

UOKiK sent the operator a formal request for information in December 2025, three months before the case became public. If the findings support the complaints, the matter can escalate to a full antitrust proceeding carrying fines of up to 10 percent of PSE\u2019s turnover, followed in all likelihood by appeals. Four months after the case became public, it remains at the preliminary stage. That timing is the whole point. The clock that matters to your balance sheet was never running on the regulator\u2019s schedule.<\/p>\n\n

Even a fast version of this process moves through a preliminary inquiry, then a possible antitrust proceeding, then a ruling, then an appeal, before it changes how the operator curtails your assets going forward. None of those stages produces compensation for your historical losses. That runs on a separate track, governed by the existing rules on curtailment compensation, and it depends entirely on the technical evidence you can produce.<\/p>\n\n

Three points of exposure<\/h2>\n\n

The operational reality creates three specific points of exposure for asset owners, whatever the antitrust question turns out to be.<\/p>\n\n

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SCADA system discrepancies.<\/strong> The lag between an operator command and the actual inverter response is a recurring source of compliance and compensation disputes. If you cannot show your own response timing, the operator\u2019s account becomes the only account.<\/p>\n\n

Compensation ambiguities.<\/strong> Without granular, timestamped data, proving the exact volume of curtailed generation, and therefore the financial loss, becomes an argument you lose on documentation rather than on merits.<\/p>\n\n

Node-level exposure.<\/strong> Assets on congested power nodes carry structurally higher curtailment risk, and that risk remains whatever any antitrust finding says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

One caveat is worth naming, because a sophisticated buyer will raise it. In 2025, the large majority of curtailed energy in Poland came from system balancing rather than local grid constraints. That does not narrow your exposure. Non-market redispatching is compensable whether it was ordered to balance the system or to relieve a congested node, and either way you can only claim what you can independently prove happened to your asset.<\/p>\n\n

One evidence problem, two kinds of owner<\/h2>\n\n

If you are a fund manager, this shows up as unexplained NAV drag and a reporting gap you cannot yet close for your investment committee: how much of the shortfall is curtailment, how much is recoverable, and on what timeline. If you are the asset manager or IPP on the ground, it shows up as an operational dispute you are currently losing by default, because the counterparty holds a better record of what happened than you do. The seat changes the symptom, but the cause is the same: nobody on your side is independently logging what the grid operator is logging.<\/p>\n\n

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Three questions worth answering today<\/h3>\n\n

How many days of raw telemetry do you still hold before your historian overwrites it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

If UOKiK rules in your favour two years from now, will you still hold the evidence to collect on it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Does your O&M contract produce a node-level, compensation-grade record, or only an incident log?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

Retention windows vary by vendor and configuration. Many industrial SCADA historian systems keep raw, high-resolution data for somewhere between 30 and 180 days before it is aggregated or purged. That is why the assessment below starts at 90 days: long enough to establish a pattern and short enough that most operators still have it.<\/p>\n\n

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Not sure which side of this you are on? Send us 90 days of curtailment logs from one asset, under NDA. Within 5 business days, at no cost, we will tell you whether the evidence stands up and roughly what it is worth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

The numbers: Poland and Germany<\/h2>\n\n

Poland does not need a foreign benchmark to see the scale. 2025 was a record year for curtailment, with roughly 1.4 TWh of renewable generation kept off the grid, twice the 2024 figure. Under EU and Polish rules, non-market curtailment of a renewable asset triggers financial compensation, benchmarked to the day-ahead revenue the unit would have earned had it kept running.<\/p>\n\n

Two things complicate that entitlement, and both work in favour of owners who document properly. Polish law leaves the exact formula to network codes and connection agreements, so two owners with almost identical losses can recover very different amounts. A large share of 2025 curtailment also fell in hours when day-ahead prices were low or negative, which means what you actually recover turns on your price basis and on whether your asset sits under a support scheme.<\/p>\n\n

To put it in concrete terms, a 50 MW solar asset curtailed across 15 days this year can represent a claim from the high five figures into the mid-six figures in euro, depending on the price basis and the support contract that apply. The range is wide for a reason, and closing it is exactly the work. It is a number most asset managers have never run for their own portfolio.<\/p>\n\n

The mechanism exists on paper, and two separate questions decide whether you collect. Whether you can prove your share of that 1.4 TWh is the first. Whether your own contract still lets you claim it is the second, and it catches more owners by surprise. Some connection agreements, umowy przy\u0142\u0105czeniowe<\/em>, contain clauses that limit or exclude the right to compensation, the kind of clause signed in 2022 or 2023 and forgotten long before curtailment started costing real money.<\/p>\n\n

Poland is not the first market to live through this. Germany\u2019s Einspeisemanagement regime has run for over a decade, and its regulator\u2019s data makes the pattern clear. Renewable generators received close to 554 million euro in curtailment compensation in 2024, still led by wind curtailment concentrated in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, even as solar curtailment volumes nearly doubled year on year while PV capacity kept outpacing grid buildout. Germany\u2019s Einspeisemanagement and Poland\u2019s redysponowanie nierynkowe<\/em> are different legal mechanisms, yet the underlying economics match. Payouts are calculated from metered curtailment volumes, and the generators who get paid promptly and in full are the ones whose own metering holds up against the grid operator\u2019s version of events. Owners relying on the operator\u2019s figures alone negotiate from a structurally weaker position.<\/p>\n\n

Why GridLink?<\/h2>\n\n

Recovering a curtailment claim takes two things. One is the legal argument that the curtailment was wrongful. The other is the engineering record that proves what it cost your specific assets, node by node and MWh by MWh. GridLink builds the second one.<\/p>\n\n

Our engineers reconstruct each curtailment event at the connection point, timestamp the command and the inverter response against it, and value the lost generation under the conditions that actually applied that day. We hand that dossier to your legal counsel and your O&M team as the technical proof their own scope was never set up to produce. The engineering side is led by dr in\u017c. Micha\u0142 Gajdzica, co-founder of GridLink and an academic specialist in power systems and protection, and the team has commissioned more than 800 MVA of grid-connected capacity in Poland, across HV substations, SCADA and protection systems, and offshore connections. That dossier is the document a claim, or an investment committee, actually runs on.<\/p>\n\n

When the audit is worth it<\/h2>\n\n
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Your assets sit on congested power nodes with a documented curtailment pattern.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Your existing records come only from the TSO or your DSO, with no independent log of your own.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Curtailment losses are material against your portfolio\u2019s expected yield.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

For isolated, low-frequency curtailment with negligible exposure, a lighter documentation review is more proportionate than a full audit. We will tell you which situation you are in before you commit to either.<\/p>\n\n

The GridLink Curtailment Evidence Audit<\/h2>\n\n

For foreign IPPs and asset managers carrying curtailment exposure, the engagement follows three steps.<\/p>\n\n

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  1. Independent telemetry audit.<\/strong> We move you off sole reliance on TSO and DSO data and set up independent, high-frequency logging of your SCADA systems, so you hold your own timestamped record of commands received and executed before the window closes.<\/li>\n\n
  2. Contract and node-level review.<\/strong> We check whether your connection agreement preserves your right to claim, and we assess power flow and congestion at your specific nodes to establish whether curtailment reflects a genuine local thermal limit or a broader pattern worth challenging.<\/li>\n\n
  3. Retroactive documentation build.<\/strong> We reconstruct historical curtailment events against weather data, dynamic line rating conditions, and market prices, and we produce a defensible technical dossier of your financial exposure, the document your claim or your investment committee needs.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n

    The engagement runs on a fixed two-week turnaround. Pricing scales with portfolio size and asset count, and most clients have a cost estimate within 48 hours of sending their logs.<\/p>\n\n

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    Find out what your evidence is worth before it ages out<\/h3>\n\n

    UOKiK will rule, in time, on whether the operator\u2019s methodology was lawful, and that ruling will not recover a single MWh you can no longer prove was curtailed. Your SCADA historian system is settling that question on its own schedule, and every week of raw telemetry that ages out is a week of claim you cannot rebuild.<\/p>\n\n

    Audit: fixed two-week turnaround, cost estimate within 48 hours of receiving your logs, all data handled under NDA. Free read: verdict within 5 business days, at no cost, all data handled under NDA.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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