As wind energy grows in Europe, so must infrastructure development. The European Parliament has considered all the renewable energy sectors in the regions and explored how projects are financed in the current programming period of structural funding. PES took a look at the existing and future measures for renewable energy infrastructure as well as electricity network plannings in cohesion programmes and in national renewable energy plans.
Renewable energy activities have a large potential to contribute to different goals of the Europe 2020 Strategy. They foster the economic development in the European Union’s (EU) regions, creating new jobs, generating new social impetus and fulfilling sustainability goals by increasing the share of renewable energy. Regional Policy as a “place-based” policy plays an essential role in driving the shift towards investment in renewable energy and its infrastructure, as more electricity will be generated in a decentralised way in future. This includes the creation of power grids, energy storage facilities, smart energy infrastructure in households and enterprises and co-generation plants for heat and power.
In view of confirming Regional Policy as key element of the EU 2020 strategy, it is important to see how the different actors in Regional Policy can support increased investment in regional renewable energy infrastructure and how these investments can impact the development of the regions. Therefore, the present study assesses the quantity and quality of the financing of projects developing regional infrastructure for renewable energy in the current programming period of Structural Funding.
The definition of what is to be defined as “Infrastructure for Renewable Energies” is difficult from a systemic perspective: renewable energy infrastructure in the narrowest sense are the facilities for renewable energy production such as solar panels, wind turbines, biomass plants, etc.
However as energy is grid dependent, the facilities for distributing and handling energy have to be considered as part of the infrastructure for renewable energy as well. In line with that the question arises if energy grids are particularly designed and set up for renewable energy distribution purposes. In recent years the establishment of “smart grids” have been linked to the setting up of renewable energy- in the sense that such grids are capable of tapping on the energy production by renewable energy sources more effectively. The idea behind these smart grid solutions is basically to counteract the “natural” disadvantages of some renewable energy sources – i.e. of being produced independently from the energy demand on the regional scale. These grids allow for a counterbalancing of temporal discrepancies between supply and demand of energy through storage, and more equal distribution of demand patterns.
