In a statement on Friday, the Ministry of Climate and Environment (MKiŚ) explained that “a regulatory sandbox is a legal structure that allows economic operators to operate in a safe test environment in order to experiment with a given project or service on a relaxed basis”. The Minister of the Environment, Michał Kurtyka, believes that regulatory sandboxes will contribute to the promotion of new solutions on the energy markets and tests of their effectiveness, and that projects implemented within them should bring tangible benefits to the energy transformation.
The ministry pointed out that in Poland, the introduction of regulatory sandboxes is primarily associated with additional regulatory powers. Thanks to them, the President of the Energy Regulatory Office could limit the regulatory requirements for innovators in order to make it easier for these entities to test a project aimed at implementing, for example, innovative technologies, products or services.
As pointed out by the ministry, among the main goals to be achieved by sandboxes is acceleration of the development of the energy sector by facilitating innovative solutions to enter the market. In this case, it is important to be able to test new technologies and business models that could not be tested in everyday conditions without the use of appropriate exceptions.