Ernst and Young has identified 375 “shovel-ready” renewables, battery and grid infrastructure projects in Europe totalling €75bn in investment.
The projects are a mix of utility-scale renewable energy, battery and transmission projects as well as smaller distributed generation investments.
The projects are detailed in EY’s ‘A Green Covid-19 Recovery and Resilience Plan for Europe’ report.
Overall the report lists a thousand “shovel-ready” clean investment projects, spanning sectors that include transportation, buildings and industry as well as energy.
In total the thousand projects will require €200bn in public and private investment as well as supporting nearly three million jobs, EY said.
EY said the rollout of the thousand projects identified will require the use of public and private financial instruments and some regulatory measures.
Difficulties to access adequate financing vary between sectors, developers and project types EY said.
“Nevertheless, all are potentially impacted by risk concerns from investors in a post-Covid-19 environment, potentially increasing financing costs or leaving a shortage of capital for innovative new ventures,” EY stated.
It pointed out that financing is only one obstacle to deployment of green projects.
EY said: “For 49% of the projects we have selected, the main barrier is nonfinancial (regulatory, administrative, commercial…).
“This means that beyond financing instruments, policy and regulatory measures will also be required in order to deliver environmental and social value.
“The stakeholder consultations we have carried out reveals several key recommendations to support a green and resilient recovery in Europe.”
EY’s list spans several projects by Enel Group, including a €400m PV module factory in Italy that will produce panels using Enel’s high-efficiency 3Sun cell technology.
The factory will potentially scale Enel’s module output from 200MW to more than 3GW a year.
Other investments of Enel’s highlighted in the report include a €1.4bn project in Teruel, for the substitution and conversion of a coal-fired plant with 1585MW of solar and 140MW of wind plus 160MW of battery storage.