REPowerEU offers new innovation opportunities for renewables
19.05.2022
Ocean Energy Europe (OEE) welcomes the European Commission’s REPowerEU initiative, which at its heart has a massive and accelerated roll-out of renewables. The Commission recognises that this is Europe’s only path to escape fossil fuel dependency and to rapidly decarbonise.
Much of REPowerEU focuses on important steps to speed up permitting processes. A new law will recognise renewable energy as ‘an overriding public interest’. And renewable projects can be fast-tracked in new ‘Go To’ areas.
But REPowerEU also recognises that Europe must remain a global leader in renewable energy technology – and this is backed up with new funding later this year.
The text confirms that the Innovation Fund’s large-scale call this autumn will have a doubled budget of circa €3bn and 3 separate funding windows.
Renewable activities are particularly suited to 2 of these windows – which focus on ‘innovative clean tech manufacturing’ and ‘mid-sized pilot projects for validating, testing and optimising highly innovative solutions’.
The moves follows concerns that earlier large-scale Innovation Fund calls were not progressing European renewable technology.
The ‘mid-sized pilot’ window is most interesting for ocean energy projects. With the right terms & conditions, this call could be an important step towards realising the EU’s target of 100MW of wave and tidal by 2025.
OEE will engage closely with the Commission and other renewable associations to ensure that the next Innovation Fund call supports a strong portfolio of innovative renewable proposals – including wave & tidal projects.