The Government allocates 40 million to promote innovative projects of energy communities

The Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge has opened two calls for aid endowed with a joint budget of 40 million euros to promote some 40 innovative projects of energy communities.

Specifically, these are two of the first calls of the Strategic Project for the Recovery and Economic Transformation of Renewable Energies, Renewable Hydrogen and Storage (Perte ERHA) and are expected to allow the materialization of these 40 renewable energy projects, electric mobility and demand management, reported the Ministry.

The deadline for submitting applications for the two calls will begin on February 1 and will remain open for one month, until March 1. They are integrated into component 7 ‘Deployment and integration of renewable energies’ of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR) for the execution of the Next Generation EU funds, which identifies energy communities as a key actor in the energy transition.

TWO CALLS

The program, called CE-Implementa, aims to promote more than 40 innovative initiatives of energy communities through two calls. The first allocates ten million to small projects, with which it is expected to promote more than 21 innovative initiatives, while the second contemplates 30 million euros to give impetus to almost twenty projects of medium or large size.

In the call for small projects, the investment may not exceed one million per project, while in the second all must exceed that investment.

MANAGED BY THE IDAE

The Institute for the Diversification and Saving of Energy (IDAE) will be in charge of managing these aids, which will be granted under a competitive competition regime and will cover up to 60% of the eligible costs of the project.

This competition will prioritize, on the one hand, multi-component and innovative projects, that is, that integrate facilities of different nature, combining renewable electrical, thermal, energy efficiency, sustainable mobility and / or demand management, in order to encourage solutions to be adopted in sectors more difficult to decarbonize.

On the other hand, special importance will be given to the social and gender impact of energy communities, the inclusion of vulnerable consumers as partners or members and the development of projects in municipalities with a demographic challenge and in those included in the Just Transition agreements.

Source: Europe Press