SO 2.2 : Promoting renewable energy in accordance with Directive (EU) 2018/2001, including the sustainability criteria set out therein

Territorial challenges and opportunities

The North-West Europe (NWE) region is one of the highest energy-consuming regions in the EU. While most countries in the Programme area are on track to achieve EU targets for deployment of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), there is an unexploited potential to improve the mix and consumption of renewable energy. Barriers must be broken down through cooperation projects to maximise this potential mix to contribute to climate change mitigation. The Programme seeks to contribute to the EU’s target of covering 32% of its energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. This can be achieved through increasing the share of renewable energy sources in the NWE territory’s mix, including wind and solar power, bioenergy, biomass, hydropower, geothermal, heat, and fuel cell hydrogen technology.

Objectives

Within this Specific Objective, the Programme aims to support projects that:
• Address barriers to improve the renewable energy production and consumption mix of the NWE region.
• Maximise their contribution to climate change mitigation, by implementing projects on different technologies (e.g., wind and solar power, bioenergy - biogas and bio-LPG - and use of biomass, hydropower, geothermal/heat-pump, as well as fuel cell/hydrogen technologies).

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Project news

Promoting renewable energy in accordance with Directive (EU) 2018/2001, including the sustainability criteria set out therein

SO 2.2 aims to contribute to increasing the capacity of NWE communities to exploit the potential to improve renewable energy production and consumption mix.
The EU has formulated a binding target to increase the use of energy from renewable sources (Directive (EU) 2018/2001). The NWE area is one of the highest energy-consuming regions in the EU. Most of the NWE countries are on track with the achievement of EU specific targets for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) deployment. There is, however, a significant unexploited potential for improving the renewable energy production and consumption mix. On the one hand, many regions in the area are still affected by fossil-based dependency, on the other, the potential for increasing the energy production from renewable sources and techniques is still high in many NWE areas (in particular, in solar, biogas and bioLPG, hydro, geothermic/ heat pump, hydrogen and wind energy). However, the deployment of RES is limited by a lack of certainty regarding future investments in some countries, and also by the persistence of legal barriers such as e.g. the extended time to issue permits (particularly for wind power). The SO also feeds into SDG 7 on affordable and clean energy.
Priority 2 -and SO 2.2 in particular- aim at contributing to the reduction on the use of fossil-based energy.
Grants are the selected form of support for this SO. The size of planned operations, and the type of cooperation of target groups beyond national borders, allow for very limited use of support other than grants. In addition, planned operations will not generate significant revenue.