When we decided to buy, and then renovate, a house here in Madrid, we wanted to make it as energy efficient as possible. For one thing, we just believed it was the right thing to do. For another, looking around most days here and seeing how much sun there is, it felt like the environment was showering us with free money. We just had to put the equipment in place to collect it. Add to that the soaring costs of energy all over Europe, and...well, it just seemed an obvious choice.
TL;DR: This post is about our experience getting the paperwork done and navigating the bureaucracy to get financial assistance from the Province of Madrid (El Comunidad de Madrid) with the solar energy installation for our home. If you're just interested in the juicy bits, skip the next few paragraphs.
Back to our regularly-scheduled program: The biggest thing that keeps most people from installing a solar-energy system is the cost. Most people look at the initial outlay of cash required, do a rough amortization, and quickly figure out they'll need to be in their house years, if not a decade or more, before they could claim to have recouped their investment. And while the cost of solar panels and related equipment has dropped pretty dramatically over the past ten years or so, the bottom line is that it still ain't cheap.
There are an increasing number of programs, however, to help incentivize people to make the initial investment. In Spain, where government-run programs tend to move even more slowly than in the U.S., it can make someone think twice before deciding if they want to go through the hassle of applying. Add to that the fact that it's not very clear how much help one can receive, plus trying to navigate the paperwork and bureaucracy involved in making an application, and many people quickly decide they don't want to be bothered. Or if you're like me, you won't actually make a decision; you'll just put it off indefinitely because you don't know where to start and the whole thing—especially the thought of doing it all in another language—seems overwhelming.
(And please don't anyone go taking offense to my statement about the speed of Spanish bureaucracy. In a country with less than 50 million people, it took more than seven months to get our tax refund. U.S. bureaucracy is no picnic, but I can always count on getting my refund no more than 30 days after submitting my U.S. income tax returns.)
In general, the company that installs your solar energy system should help you and file most of the paperwork. Some people to whom I've spoken about this said they didn't recall having to do any work for the process. Regardless, our installer needed us to get several pieces of paperwork to add to the packet he's submitting.
The documents you'll need to provide are:
- Documento Acreditativo de Residencia Fiscal. This is a "tax residence document". If I understand correctly, this document basically verifies that you reside in Spain for the purpose of being taxed. It differs from a couple of other, similar documents that do similar things (specifically, the Certificado de residencia fiscal España-Convenio and the Certificado de no residentes en España, which serve other purposes I won't get into here.)
- Certificado Corriente de Pago Tributario. The title of this document translates as, "Current Tax Payment Certificate". Again assuming my understanding is correct, this document verifies that your property taxes are currently paid in full.
- Certificado de No Tener Deudas con la Comunidad de Madrid. Like the previous document, this "Certificate of No Debts with the Community of Madrid" certifies that you don't have any other money you currently owe to the state. I'm not sure everything that this includes, but basically, the state wants to be sure you don't owe it money before it considers giving you some.
There are a few other things that will be needed to submit the application for assistance, but your solar installer should be helping you with those. The ones above were the ones that we needed to get ourselves. I'll discuss actually getting these documents in a moment.
For completeness, the other document that I know about is called the Tasa Por Presentación de Servicios Urbanísticas ("Fee for Provision of Urban Services"). Again, in our case, the solar-system installer filled it out and submitted it for us. There was an associated fee, as the title suggests, of 288€. The installer paid this for us and then billed us for it.
The million-dollar question: how do you get the documents listed above?
This is the really valuable part of this post, which hopefully makes it easier for you than it was for us. All three documents must be obtained from the Agencia Tributaria de la Comunidad de Madrid (the Tax Agency for the Community of Madrid).
Supposedly, there is a way of requesting these documents online. After searching the website for Agencia Tributaria, however, I couldn't find any reference to them. So, in our case, we did what's worked for a number of other situations: we made an appointment to go see someone at the tax office.
In case you're not familiar with navigating any of this, you generally need to make an appointment online before you try to go see someone at the Agencia Tributaria. The same goes for anything you may need from Spanish National Government. If you make an appointment beforehand, you'll be presented with available dates and times, and be (relatively) assured of getting to see someone. In fact, there are many times when the guard at the front door to a government building won't even let you in if you can't show them evidence that you already have an appointment booked for that day.
One other important note: Once you get inside the building, you'll still need to go to the little kiosk that doles out the numbered tickets and get yours. Without that, you'll never get called to one of the desk, whether you have an appointment or not.
So anyway, we booked an appointment. Now, the last time we went to see someone at the Agencia Tributaria, we went to the office on Calle de Guzmán. This is a huge building with several floors of information desks and cubicles and lines to wait in. The last time we went there, we kept getting sent to different departments. But that's a story for another time.
When we went online to make this appointment, we couldn't get a time at the Calle de Guzmán office that would work with our schedules. So we wound up going to the office in Alcobendas, on Calle Ruperto Chapí. It was a little farther away, but what a difference it made! Because it was smaller, if someone at one desk didn't know something, or needed some extra information, they just walked over and talked to the person at the other desk! It was awesome.
Seriously. I'd worked to set my expectation super low, telling myself that, while we probably wouldn't get even one document we needed, at least we would gather some information that would help us decide what to do next. But I was wrong, and in a great way!! We were able to order all three documents we needed, and we were in and out in under 40 minutes!! Afterward, we went for a celebratory lunch in the mall around the corner.
Now, in true Spanish government fashion, we didn't actually leave the office with the documents. But we did leave with recibos de presentación, essentially receipts showing we'd requested each of the documents. Now we just have to wait for the actual documents to show up in the mail, scan them, and send them to our solar installer so he can finish submitting the paperwork.
Conclusion
To wrap things up:
- There is financial assistance available, offered by the Spanish government, to help defray the cost of installing solar panels.
- There are three documents that you will likely need to obtain in order to apply (see above.)
- You can order all three documents by going to the Tax Office (the Agencia Tributaria.)
- If you're going to go to the Agencia Tributaria, you should make an appointment first.
- Going by our most recent experience, I suggest going to a smaller tax office as opposed to one of the bigger ones, even if it means you have to travel a little farther.
One other bit of info: while writing this post, I used Google to search for "purpose of Documento Acreditativo de Residencia Fiscal", and found what appears to be the place for requesting this document from the Agencia Tributaria website. Subsequent Google searches found this link for the Certificado Corriente de Pago Tributario, and this one for the Certificado de No Tener Deudas con la Comunidad de Madrid. This would, of course, save you from needing to get an appointment and go to the office. I guess my mistake the first time I searched was using the search feature on Agencia Tributaria's website. Let that be a lesson to me.
A few notes other notes on using the online government services: first, the link above is good as of the writing of this post; no guarantees after that. Second, you'll need a Cl@ve, which is used across Spanish government sites in tandem with your national ID to verify your identity and requesting all kinds of things online. I talk about how to obtain one of these in a different post.
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