17.07.2019.
Today at 16:00 the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund closed the Public Call for co-financing the systems for using renewable energy sources (RES) in family houses.
“The citizens showed great interest in using renewables, and almost 700 applications to this public call were received in a relatively short period,” said the director of the Fund, Dubravko Ponoš, upon the closure of the call. The received applications will be processed in the order of receipt, and funding will be approved to all the applicants who submitted the completed documentation and whose applications fall within the budget of 11 million kunas. “We probably won’t be able to accept all submitted applications and we will have to put a cap on spending, but we definitely plan to continue with this programme next year. In the last two years all our co-financing programmes have been continuous, so the citizens, design engineers, contractors, and distributors know what they can expect,” said Ponoš, adding that in the last 2 years 23 million kunas of incentives were made available for promoting RES in houses.
Citizens will be granted funding for purchasing different RES systems, such as biomass fired boilers, heat pumps, and solar thermal collectors for water heating. The goal of this programme is to reduce the consumption of energy in households and advance heating systems. Apart from lower costs of energy-generating products and creating the environment that is more pleasant live in, projects like these at the same time increase the safety of the systems themselves. For the installation of one or several systems, the citizens could get up to HRK 75,000, or in percentage up to 40, 60 or 80 %, thus significantly reducing the ROI period.
This autumn the Fund is planning to publish similar calls for installing photovoltaic power plants on family houses, and in the tourism sector for private businesses and family holdings.
Croatia has achieved the national goals concerning the use of RES, mainly owing to hydroelectric power plants that generate the greatest quantity of energy, but in order to significantly reduce the use of fossil fuels and to achieve true energy independence, it is vital to stimulate individual projects in households. At that it is important to put emphasis on the local sources of energy, regardless of whether they are solar, geothermal, or biomass.