Specific Objectives:

In many European countries hydro power is often opposed by public bodies and NGOs, worried about the risk of adverse effects on the "good status" of water bodies, that, according to the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC, WFD), has to be reached by the year 2016. Many opportunities of more sustainable hydro power generation are lost, due to the lack of assessment criteria to identify them.

The proposed action aims at developing a technically and economically feasible certification procedure for hydro power generation facilities of high environmental standard, being explicitly coherent with the requirements of the Water Framework Directive, to be implemented in "green labelled" electricity products, and being integrated, as much as possible, with existing EU tools, such as Ecolabel, EMAS, EIA and SEA. This includes developing a general, agreed and widely transferable approach for such a certification, discussed by all relevant stakeholders, and developing an operational methodology, which will be tested for 2 partner countries -Italy and Slovenia. The certification methodology will primarily refer to existing plants. However, to allow a wider use of the results of the project, the issue of new hydropower plants authorization will be considered. Following the same logical approach used for the certification of existing plants, a set of guidelines will be produced, to be used by decision makers during planning and authorization procedures and by plants proposers in their EIA and SEA studies. Specific objective for the partner country France is to evaluate the possibility of upgrading the existing "green" energy label integrating an explicit reference to the WFD. Specific objective for Spain and Slovakia is to build interest on the approach among key actors and to identify main problems and feasibility issues to be tackled, in order to pave the way for near future implementation as in Italy and Slovenia.

Description of the work:

The proposed work programme includes a first reviewing activity, aiming at building the knowledge base necessary to take agreed decisions about the certification method to be adopted (WP 2), followed by plenary activities focusing on taking decisions about the general approach to be adopted for certification; this is followed by more national oriented tasks, based especially on workshops with experts and stakeholders, aiming at defining the national operational methods for Italy and Slovenia (WP 3). The agreed methodologies are then tested at real scale in different types of power plants and the information gathered during these pilot certifications is analysed and used to review the methods and get to a final formalization (WP 4). WP 5 is especially focused on discussing the possible structure and functioning of an organisation issuing the labels and the possible integration of the operational methods developed within existing labelling schemes. WP 1 will be devoted to project management, WP 6 to communication and dissemination and WP 7 to common dissemination activities.

Major outputs and results:

• Reports on main technical tools and regulatory frameworks related to hydropower certification -General methodological approach for WFD-coherent certification agreed by project partners
• National operational method for certification defined and tested in Italy and Slovenia, based on consultation of national experts and stakeholders
• Guidelines for Decision Makers and hydro power generation company, for siting, construction and management of new "green hydro" plants
• Analysis document f