Local Coffee Workshop - Croatia
22nd July 2020, Online
The local coffee workshop was organized by the representatives of PP3-IRENA on the 22nd of July. Due to the restrictions for the organization of physical events in Croatia, the workshop was organized on the ZOOM platform, with a total of 9 participants from Local and Regional Authorities, commercial banks, and two participants representing consultancy firms.
Mr Andrea Poldrugovac opened the workshop with few introduction sentences.
The workshop was planned as a presentation of the assessment procedures developed by the project partners to assess public investments for the industry’s low carbon energy transition as one of the main outputs of the project. As FIRECE project aims to contribute to the implementation of the Regional Energy Plans to achieve the targets on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources planned at EU and national level with particular attention to industry, the tool was developed as to assess assess public investments to support industry's low-carbon transition.
In the overall explanation, Andrea Poldrugovac from IRENA said that the tool was developed during the implementation of the projects first thematical work package “Increasing competence to manage Regional Energy Plans and elaboration of the Action Plan” and in the second work package “Implementation of the instruments, testing and transferability actions” it was adapted to the local specifications and used in the testing phase under the project Pilot Action 2.
The workshop continued with the practical examples of each tool, the Programme level tool and the project level tool.
During the presentation and testing of the Programme level tool, Andrea Poldrugovac explained that Programme level tool can be used to assess potential impacts of a new public funding/financing programme, which aim is to support industry’s low-carbon transition (i.e. support of investment into energy-saving and renewable energy measures).
The instrument allows the user to calculate the expected use of budget allocation, expected investment generated, expected energy savings and expected decrease of emissions. The representative of the Istrian County, Mr Aleksandar Major stated that this type of tool can be also very useful for the development and assessment of existing financing models that are managed by the County, and that in the following period the tool will be also presented to other departments of the County.
Project level tool was more interesting to the representatives of the commercial banks and consulting firms. As Mr Poldrugovac said, the Project level tool main focus is to evaluate economic parameters of a particular project (e.g. NPV – net present values, CF – cash flow, etc.) as well as its environmental benefits in terms of decreased carbon emissions. With reference to funding/financial support, the user is able to simulate how different types of instruments (subsidies, loans) and different shares of financial support affect economic parameters of the project and so its financial viability. During the presentation, various combinations were tested, and all the participants agreed that this type of tool can be very useful to assess a single project.
The local seminar was concluded after the discussion among the participants.
