How Much Will It Take For A Just Climate Transition In Spain?

By Carolyn Fortuna - Clean Technica, February 4, 2023

Spain will receive almost €869 million from the Just Transition Fund to kickstart its energy transformation in equitable ways.

It’s imperative that the climate transition in Spain work to phase out coal for energy production ahead of its 2030 initial energy scheme planning. If successful, the end result will be a region invested in energy efficiency, circular economy, and clean energy sources. It will foster economic resilience, renewables, and jobs.

And it looks like it just might happen. Spain will receive almost €869 million from the Just Transition Fund (JTF) following the adoption of the Just Transition Program, which includes its Territorial Just Transition Plan (TJTP).

The Just Transition Mechanism (JTM) is a key tool to ensure that the transition towards a climate-neutral economy happens in a fair way, leaving no one behind. The JTM addresses the social and economic effects of the transition, focusing on the regions, industries, and workers who will face the greatest challenges, through 3 pillars.

• A new Just Transition Fund of €19.2 billion in current prices, is expected to mobilize around €25.4 billion in investments.
• The InvestEU “Just Transition” scheme will provide a budgetary guarantee under the InvestEU program across the 4 policy windows and an InvestEU Advisory Hub that will act as a central entry point for advisory support requests. It is expected to deploy €10-15 billion in mostly private sector investments.
• A new Public Sector Loan Facility will combine €1.5 billion of grants financed from the EU budget with €10 billion of loans from the European Investment Bank, to marshall €18.5 billion of public investment.

The JTF will invest in solar, offshore wind, renewable hydrogen, and the green transformation of the country’s industry in several concerning areas, according to the EU:

• the province of A Coruña in Galicia
• the provinces of Teruel in Aragón, León, and Palencia in Castilla y León
• the provinces of Almería, Cádiz, and Córdoba in Andalusia
• a group of municipalities around Alcúdia on the island of Mallorca

The region of Asturias will receive almost one third of the Spanish JTF funding, in part to support an innovation hub for artificial intelligence in a former mining site.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.