The NESOI project, co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, is the EU Islands Facility and acts to facilitate islands’ energy transition, offering technical and financial assistance to bring islands’ clean energy projects a step towards their implementation.
NESOI, started in October 2019, is achieving significant impacts: the two-round open call received 168 applications from 16 Countries and selected 54 projects from over 60 islands, potentially able to mobilize more than 500 million € of investments and to avoid 420,000 tCO2e of GHG emissions.
This large set of projects, either analysed during the proposals’ evaluation process or studied in detail for the provision of technical and financial assistance, constitutes a representative sample of opportunities for energy transition of EU islands.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the information available about islands’ features and needs and their energy transition projects, with the target of defining suitable technology integrations and potential couplings between islands and technologies to maximize the decarbonisation impact.
Pairings are carried out based on strengths/weaknesses and potential complementarity of technologies and the islands’ needs and availability of resources. As a result, an overall picture is provided describing which technologies can be applied on islands, how they can be combined and which of them will have higher impacts. Finally, the different types of stakeholders that may promote projects related to the technological solutions under analysis are also considered.
