The Clean energy for EU islands Secretariat has four main responsibilities. It aims to create a community of islands, provide a marketplace, provide technical support to islands, and analyse the legal and regulatory aspects that are important for islands in transition. Within the past six months, we from the secretariat’s think tank on legislation and regulations have been assessing the current state-of-play of clean energy legislative and regulatory frameworks in 15 European member states with inhabited islands (see picture).
Our assessment included collecting information regarding national legislation and regulation that provides support to:
- renewable energy projects concerning electricity, heating, cooling, and transport covering various aspects like, e.g., training of the workforce, RES project permission and authorization procedure, grid connection, support for needed infrastructure;
- energy efficiency projects, from workforce training to support mechanisms for different sectors (industry, buildings, transport, public sector);
- prosumers and energy sharing through collective self-consumption or varying forms of energy communities.
Drawing from the legal and regulatory assessment, we are currently working on a publicly available online database that will be available on the Clean energy for EU islands website. The database will make it easy for actors to find out about clean energy technologies and their implementation status in each of the 15 member states. In addition, a two-page country specific factsheet will accompany the database. These factsheets will provide general information on each of the member states and a summary of currently supported clean energy technologies and policies. The secretariat aims to create the database as a place where anyone can find information about the implementation of projects on a member state’s islands, or details on local regulatory frameworks concerning the support of specific clean energy technologies. The
“Our think tank team is greatly excited about the database and we aim to have it online available from mid-September 2021 on the Clean Energy for EU islands website”, says Lucija Rakocevic, Research and Development Manager at Th!nk E.