ZAGREB,В  25 Jan (Hina) – The European Commission on Thursday disbursed €585.1 million to Croatia, as an advance payment within the REPowerEU Plan,В which is part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP).

The advance payments under the REPowerEU were today also sent to Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Romania and Spain.

These advance payments will help to kick-start the implementation of the crucial investment and reform measures outlined in each REPowerEU chapter. This will accelerate the delivery on the REPowerEU Plan’s objectives to save energy, produce clean energy and diversify energy supplies, with a view to making Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Pre-financing payments, paid out in either one or two steps, are equivalent to up to 20% of the additional funds requested to finance each country’s REPowerEU chapter.

In November, the European Commission gave theВ go-ahead for Croatia’sВ modified recovery and resilience plan, which includes a REPowerEU chapter.

The NRRP plan is now worth €10 billion (€5.8 billion in Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) grants and €4.2 billion in RRF loans) and covers 84 reforms and 253 investments.

Croatia’s proposed REPowerEU chapter, worth €2.9 billion, includes one new reform, three scaled-up reforms, and five new and three scaled-up investments drawing on existing measures.

They focus on promoting energy efficiency in buildings, reducing the dependency on fossil fuels by increasing the production and uptake of renewables such as sustainable biomethane, renewable hydrogen and geothermal energy, accelerating the deployment of renewable energy, addressing energy poverty, addressing bottlenecks in electricity distribution, zero-emission transport, requalifying the workforce towards green skills and improving security of energy supply and diversifying the Union’s gas supply.