Can Eastern Europe Use New EU Funding and Legislation to Help Europe Achieve Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050?

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is one of the first major regions to propose binding greenhouse-gas (GHG) emission reduction targets. Specifically, the EU aims to cut GHG by at least 55% by 2030 and become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. To achieve these targets, the EU has set up a series of public funding instruments to support proposed investments in renewables and energy efficiency projects, including but not limited to geothermal projects. A wide range of projects are envisaged, from innovative to more mature, well-established technologies, and from small-scale RD&I to large-scale plants. This article takes a closer look at a representative sample of he post-communist EU members – Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and Bulgaria --to assess how well they are equipped to take advantage of these new geothermal-development opportunities from a legislative, administrative and legal point of view. The analysis necessarily applies to Renewable-energy (RE) law, a particular subset of energy law. RE relates primarily to transactional legal and policy issues involved in the development, implementation, and commercialization of such renewable-energy sources as solar, wind, geothermal and tidal.