The Minister of the Environment, Duarte Cordeiro, announced the reopening of applications to the More Sustainable Buildings Program from August 16 until October 31. The allocation of the first notice of 2023 will be 30 million euros.
There is good news and bad news for those who have invested in installing solar panels at home, more efficient windows or bought a heat pump, among other energy efficiency improvements, and have been waiting since May 2022 for Government subsidies to return.
The good news is that applications for the More Sustainable Residential Buildings Support Program 2023, on the “Fundo Ambiental” platform, will reopen in a month, on August 16, ending on October 31, or as soon as the first tranche of 30 million (out of a total of 100 million available this year) decided by the Government for the new notice, already published.
The bad news concerns the reduction of the support amounts in some typologies of investments. In the previous notice, those who installed solar panels at home (regardless of whether they had batteries or not) could get up to 85% of the amount spent, but with a maximum limit of €2,500. Already this year, the program subsidies for solar panels do not go beyond 1,000 euros for applications from Lisbon or Porto, without energy storage systems. For the remaining regions, the support is increased by 10% and can grow up to 1,100 euros.
However, if the applicant projects include batteries from now on, the limits for the subsidy increase exponentially and become €3,000 for applications from Lisbon or Porto, and €3,300 for the remaining regions of the country.
According to the implementation report of the previous phase of the More Renewable Buildings Program, the Environmental Fund supported almost 71,000 eligible applications, with the highest incidence in Lisbon (20,537, 19.4%) and Porto (13,652, 12.9%). The installation of solar photovoltaic systems (37.2%), efficient windows (23.8%) and heat pumps (26.1%) dominated.
In total, between June 2021 and May 2022, the Environmental Fund received 106,131 applications, of which 70,344 were paid, which equates to a total expenditure of €189.6 million. Of this amount, 69.7 million euros were spent by the Portuguese on solar panels, 51.3 million on heat pumps and 45.8 million on efficient windows.
Now, the Government has decided to change the rules of the game. In addition to the “geographical increase for families living outside the districts of Lisbon and Porto”, only “permanent housing properties” will be considered eligible in the new applications.
“In this new notice we sought to evolve and focus more on permanent housing, to increase certain types of investments, such as efficient windows, and applications outside Lisbon and Porto, given the previous concentration of support in these regions”, explained Duarte Cordeiro, underlining the 10% increase in the maximum incentive limit per type of intervention for applications outside the districts of Lisbon and Porto.
He also explained why applications have been closed for the past 14 months. “We only submitted a new call for this program now because we exhausted all the available funds with the previous call. All we had to do was ask for a reinforcement and that’s what we did, under RePowerEU. We got another €700 million, of which €200 million for energy efficiency: €120 million for households and €80 million for services,” the minister said in Parliament.
As far as efficient windows are concerned, the new notice will be more generous. Until now, those who installed this equipment with an energy class higher than A+ could recover up to 1,500 euros, while now the support has grown to 2,000 euros for those living in Lisbon or Porto, and to 2,200 euros for applicants from the rest of the country.
In heat pumps, the third most supported typology in the second phase of the More Sustainable Buildings program, the maximum subsidy was previously 2,500 euros, now falling to 2,000 euros for Lisbon and Porto and to 2,200 euros in the rest of the country.
The Government’s goal is to support 70,000 new applications to achieve at least 7.3 million m2 of renovated area and reduce polluting emissions by 18.5 tons of CO2.
Each applicant for support from the More Sustainable Buildings program can only seek up to a maximum limit of 7,500 euros, per apartment or house, and this amount is deducted from the value of subsidies already received in previous phases.
