The European Commission has approved a government scheme to provide up to €300 million in temporary electricity price relief to Irish energy-intensive companies.
Companies will be able to claim back a share of their electricity costs for a maximum of three years. The scheme will be backdated to run from last summer up until 2029.
To benefit from the scheme, businesses must promise to invest at least 50 percent of the state aid in “new or modernised assets to reduce electricity system costs, reflecting market and system needs, without increasing fossil fuel use.”
The European Commission said that the scheme is “in line with the objectives of the Clean Industrial Deal”, which aims to encourage big polluters to decarbise and switch to renewables.
The scheme was approved under the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF) adopted by the European Commission in June last year.
“The purpose of the [Irish] scheme is to support energy-intensive companies by compensating them for a share of their electricity costs for a maximum of three years,” the European Commission said in its approval notice.
“The scheme will be open to companies active in sectors with a significant risk of activities moving outside the EU to locations where environmental measures are absent or less ambitious. This risk depends on the electro-intensity of the sector in question and its openness to international trade.”