The government has presented the Spring Memorandum 2024 and it offers prospects for the energy transition. It is also positive that the Draft Multi-Year Program Climate Fund (MJP) 2025 has been further developed. Nevertheless, Energie-Nederland believes that more is needed to achieve the climate objectives. Below is a brief overview of our most important points.
- ETS2: support for the broad opt-in for ETS-2, which also includes pricing for CO2 emissions from the built environment, mobility, small industry (which falls outside ETS-1) and part of agriculture.
- Heat networks: positive that more resources are being released for heat networks via the WIS (Heat Networks Investment Subsidy) and the Heat Networks Guarantee Fund (Waarborgfonds Warmtenetten). This will provide support to initiatives for new networks. It remains crucial that affordability for households and investability for companies, with reasonable returns for both public and private heating companies, are in balance; both are necessary to accelerate the rollout of heating networks. It is worrying that the Heat Network Guarantee Fund is only made available to public heating companies.
- Hydrogen rate: support for the introduction of a separate and reduced hydrogen rate in the energy tax. This provides clarity for the medium term.
- Climate Fund: At the start of the current cabinet in early 2022, a Climate Fund of €35 billion was presented. These resources have been reserved but can only be spent if there are concrete implementation of measures and they are linked to a specific year. The MJP 2025 now proposes to transfer more than € 9 billion from the “reserved” status to concrete “allocation”, which is good news. The Senate and Members of Parliament decide whether this actually happens. The use of these budgets is crucial for the energy transition.
