The topic of the meeting was AmCham's position paper ’Recommendations for the Improvement of Allocation of Incentives for Cleaner Transport' aimed at securing more e-vehicles on roads and expanding network of charging stations in Croatia. Representatives of the Fund included Alenka Košiša Čičin-Šain, Deputy Director, Ljiljana Bukovec, Advisor to the Director and Mario Mihetec, Head of Department.

"Increasing incentives for purchase of energy efficient vehicles and construction of charging stations while ensuring continuity of public call are crucial to support the development of e-mobility in Croatia. The funds earmarked for e-mobility in recent years are not sufficient to achieve a significant share of e-vehicles and charging stations in Croatia. In addition, there is a need to ensure continuity of incentives, not only in the coming years, but also in terms of an open year-round public call”, said Andrea Doko Jelusic, AmCham Executive Director.

After a pause in 206 and 2017, AmCham welcomes the EPEEF's practice of resuming co-financing purchase of energy efficient vehicles (for citizens and legal entities) from 2018 and for construction of charging stations from 2019. 

In addition to increasing funding and ensuring continuity, it is important to provide additional transparency when purchasing vehicles by applying the known categorization of eligible vehicles. The responsibility of the persons who have reserved funds from the Fund based on the supplier's offer is a necessary as they can cancel their purchase without any consequences and thus prevent other interested parties - stated in AmCham's position.

In terms of charging stations it is necessary accept costs for electricity connection and all costs of installation and distribution of the power cable from the existing main switch cabinet to the charging station unit as eligible as they represent the main part of the investment. There is no monitoring mechanism for energy consumption at co-financed charging stations and it needs to be put in place and give priority to a digitized monitoring system for energy consumption at charging stations.

AmCham believes that it would be necessary to simplify the administrative process of collecting documentation and that all documents / data held by other institutions should be requested directly.

Transport accounts for almost a quarter of European greenhouse gas emissions. Among various forms of transport, road traffic is by far the greatest greenhouse gas emissions polluter with a share of over 70%. In order to achieve ambitious national and European climate goals it is paramount to embrace technologies with reduced CO2 emissions, using renewable energy source such as e-mobility.