Cyprus curtailed more than half of its potential renewable power in early 2025, including record residential solar cuts, as grid limits and a lack of storage strain its energy transition. Without swift investment in flexibility, analysts warn the country risks eroding public trust and delaying decarbonization.

Curtailment of green power in Cyprus has become an acute issue for the country’s electricity sector, which is now also cutting significant volumes of solar power generated by residential and small commercial units. Unless Cyprus meaningfully adopts energy storage, its energy transition remains in jeopardy.

According to CyprusGrid, an energy analytics platform focused on the country’s electricity sector, Cyprus curtailed 145,000 MWh of renewable energy between January and May 2025 – a 58% curtailment rate out of an estimated 251,000 MWh of potential clean generation.

In contrast, Cyprus curtailed 29% of its generated renewable energy in 2024, up from 13.4% in 2023 and 3.3% in 2022.

Also notable, said Dr. Andreas Procopiou, founder of CyprusGrid, is that Cyprus is curtailing a record volume of solar power from residential PV units this year. In the first five months of 2025, Cyprus’ grid operators curtailed 19,850 MWh of solar from residential and small commercial PV systems – about 14% of total curtailed energy during that period, Procopiou told pv magazine.

In the past, said Procopiou, power curtailments in Cyprus mainly affected large solar plants monitored through the network operators’ SCADA systems. In cases of significant imbalances between generation and demand, network operators could resort to alternative control methods such as ripple control, but this happened rarely.

Thus, while in 2024 Cypriot grid operators curtailed a cumulative 1,500 MWh of residential solar power, from January to May this year they curtailed around 19,850 MWh using the ripple control method – a sharp increase over the same period in 2024, representing an increase of more than 1,200%.

The increase in residential solar curtailment comes as Cyprus’ self-consumption programs – net metering and net billing – contribute a large share of newly added PV capacity.

In 2024, Cyprus installed 159 MW of new solar capacity, of which 100 MW were self-consumption units.

The government has also signaled plans to abolish net metering from Aug. 1 and possibly introduce net billing, but the sector is still waiting for an official announcement.

Procopiou said he is disappointed that the forthcoming policy shift is happening without public dialogue or transparency, but he claimed that the problem is not the shift itself.

“Net billing can be part of a modern energy framework. The real issue is that, once again, we’re seeing reactive policy-making, not planning,” he explained. “Everything we’re facing today, from curtailment to grid saturation, was entirely predictable. Time and again the domestic solar PV has warned that net metering without incentives for storage and flexibility would not be enough. Years later, the system is overwhelmed, and instead of building solutions, we’re pulling the plug on citizens who invested in clean energy in good faith.”

Procopiou argued that Cyprus is not undergoing a genuine energy transition, but rather backsliding while presenting it as progress – a move he warned could alienate thousands of households that invested in clean energy in good faith.

By the end of 2024, Cyprus had 1,478 MW of fossil fuel capacity, 797 MW of solar, 155 MW of wind, and 12.4 MW of biomass plants.