EN 
PT_BR 
This week, the Mato Grosso Court determined that the State Government should stop charging ICMS (Tax on the Circulation of Goods and Services) for citizens who produce their own electrical energy from sunlight.
The decision was taken by judge Carlos Roberto Barros de Campos, from the 2nd Public Finance Court of Cuiabá, after the order of a writ of mandamus proposed by lawyer Ana Oliveira de Almeida Cerqueira.
The agenda was the center of discussions in the Legislative Assembly of Mato Grosso in the last days. In the document, the lawyer claims that the relationship between residences that produce photovoltaic energy and energy distributors does not occur in the form of “merchant”, but rather as a free loan.
In his decision, Barros de Campos accepted the lawyer's argument and understood that the ICMS can only be levied on operations relating to the legal and commercial movement of goods.
In this sense, the tax would be charged not for the production of solar energy, but for the use of the distribution network, since homes do not have a storage system and the energy only leaves the plates for the grid before returning to the homes. Consumption and production is calculated with a bidirectional clock.
Old controversy
A ICMS collection for photovoltaic energy producers It is not new in Brazil and continues to generate discussion today. At the beginning of last month, an energy generation consortium formed by small and medium-sized companies from Pernambuco, for example, was also exempted from paying the tax by the Court, after the State claimed that the passage of energy through the distribution system justified the charge .
One Response
So in this case, can concessionaires charge tax for using the network?