Guidebook for replication of clean energy transition projects on islands

The EU Island Facility NESOI (New Energy Solutions Optimised for Islands) is a Horizon 2020 project funded under call topic LCSC3-ES8-2019 (European Islands Facility – Unlock financing for energy transitions and supporting islands to develop investment concepts). It is led by a multi-disciplinary consortium of ten partners from seven EU Member States. Through consortium capacity-building activities, the Facility’s objective was mobilise more than €100 million in public/private investment for sustainable energy projects reaching 2,400 inhabited EU islands by 2023, making it possible to test innovative energy technologies and approaches cost-effectively, resulting expected energy savings of 440 GWh/year and avoiding GHG emissions of 160,000 tCO2e/y.

In the context of the global effort to tackle climate change and transition to renewable energy sources, the European Commission is taking action to make islands the drivers of the EU’s energy transition efforts. Islands have specific characteristics, including geographic, economic and climate conditions. In most cases, this leads to poor access to power grids, higher power generation costs, greater difficulty in accessing finance, higher energy poverty and greater climate risks compared to mainland regions. They are therefore the perfect locations to encourage energy transition and innovation initiatives.

By working in close cooperation with the Clean Energy for EU Islands Secretariat, these objectives aim to facilitate a bottom-up transition to clean energy on EU islands. NESOI envisages bringing this objective one step closer by providing islands with training, technical support, cooperation opportunities, and robust funding opportunities to effectively convert Island Sustainable Energy Action Plans into Renewable Energy Sources (RES) plants, building and energy infrastructure retrofitting, reducing energy bills, creating local job among other benefits

This is the context for producing this Replication Guidebook, through which NESOI envisages promoting NESOI supported projects and encourage their replication.

NESOI has developed this replication guidebook to encourage other islands in Europe and around the world to replicate the 54 existing NESOI projects. Common and distinctive features of all the project islands were identified to produce a guidebook of best practices and lesson learned.

Download the full guidebook below!