Government adopts national action plan for renewables

The government on Thursday adopted a national action plan for renewable energy sources until 2020 which shifts the focus from encouraging wind farm construction to energy production from biomass, biogas, cogeneration plants and small hydroelectric power plants, reducing the total incentive costs.

The plan is in line with the European Union directive on renewable sources which contains measures through which member countries must ensure 20 per cent of renewables in energy consumption by 2020.

In Croatia, renewables accounted for 15.1% of energy consumption at the end of 2012 and are expected to reach 15.8% by the end of this year.

To meet the EU goal, the government wants to encourage small hydroelectric power plants, biomass and biogas because these projects have the biggest impact on the economy.

Economy Minister Ivan Vrdoljak said the encouragement of wind farms showed that Croatia was not helping its industry, but the industries of other countries from which most of the wind farm equipment came from.

He said energy production from biomass, biogas, cogeneration plants and small hydroelectric power plants created ten times more jobs than wind farms.

If Croatia kept the current concept of encouraging renewables, the costs of that in the 2013-20 period would amount to HRK 21.1 billion, while the action plan adopted today reduced them to HRK 13.9 billion.

The government also defined a new fee, including for households, for the encouragement of electricity production from renewables and cogeneration plants, raising it from 0.5 lipa to 3.5 lipa, without VAT. This, according to Vrdoljak, will suffice to cover the costs of the realisation of the action plan.

He said green energy was expensive and that the fee for it in Croatia was one per cent in the total electricity price, as against 12% in Italy and 20% in Germany.

He was hopeful that suppliers would not increase the electricity bills because of the fee increase.

Also today, the government gave its consent to Croatian Railways' Infrastructure division to borrow HRK 1 billion to upgrade the rail infrastructure.

At the closed-door part of today's session, the government appointed Miroslav Papa Croatia's new representative in the Council of Europe Development Bank Governing Board.

(Hina)



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