The European Commission has found a Portuguese scheme aimed at promoting renewable energy technologies to be in line with EU state aid rules. The scheme will support demonstration projects producing renewable energy from the ocean (wave energy and tidal energy) and innovative offshore wind technologies.
The scheme will support demonstration projects with a total installed capacity of 50 megawatts (MW), of which 25MW have already been allocated to the so-called "Windfloat project". This project will test floating offshore wind turbines in real operating conditions. For the remaining 25 MW capacity, project proposals can be submitted until the end of this year. The aid will be granted for 25 years in the form of a feed-in-tariff to compensate for the higher costs of the new technologies. The project will also benefit from investment aid and funding from NER300 – the EU support program for innovative low-carbon energy demonstration projects.
