Community Guidelines for State Aid for Environmental
Protection
The Commission have just published their draft text of the "
Community guidelines for State aid for environmental protection"
available at
http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/state_aid/reform/reform.html
The draft guidelines covers aid for the following purposes:
- Aid for firms improving on Community standards or increasing
the level of environmental protection in the absence of Community
standards.
- Aid for early adaptation to future community Standards
- Aid for undertaking improving on Community standards or on
environmental protection in the absence of Community standards in
the transport sector
- Aid for energy saving
- Aid for renewable energy sources
- Aid for the combined production of electric power and heat
(CHP) and aid for district heating
- Aid for Waste management
- Aid for the remediation of contaminated sites
- Aid for the relocation of undertakings
- Aid in the form of tax reductions or exemptions
- Aid in the form of tradable permit schemes
You should also look out for changes to aid intensity levels,
eligible costs calculations, criteria for economic assessment of
cases and thresholds for notifying certain types of aid. On the
latter, the Commission have also asked that Member states pay
particular attention to paragraph 140b of the draft guidelines
concerning the thresholds for detailed assessment of important
individual cases. The Commission would be very grateful if Member
states could provide data concerning the implication of the
proposed thresholds in terms of number of State aid notifications
for each category of aid.
Furthermore as we have seen with all recently revised guidelines
in other areas of State aid, there are new and additional reporting
and monitoring requirements that you should be aware of, including
the requirement to publish the full text of all final aid schemes
on the internet and to communicate the internet address of the
publication to the Commission.
We would like to see more radical changes to these guidelines
and we would be very grateful if you could consider, in particular
how you would like to see the guidelines changed to reflect current
environmental needs. You may wish to distribute the draft
Environmental Guidelines to other colleagues who may have an
interest in its provisions and to make your stakeholder base aware
of the paper and encourage them to respond with their views.
The deadline for comments is June 25 2007. To allow DTI time to
prepare a coordinated UK response - I would appreciate it if you
could please return your comments to us by Monday 18 June at the
latest.
Return your comments to: jayant.mehta@nwda.co.uk or
pernille.kousgaard@nwda.co.uk
Further information on State Aid in the Northwest can be found
on the State Aid
Extranet