The Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO) publishes today on its website the provisional resolution of the second call of the PERTE for digitization of the water cycle, granting aid of a total amount of 300 million euros for the improvement of the digitization of the urban water cycle, which can be consulted here.
Specifically in La Rioja, the beneficiaries are the Group of Municipalities of Logroño, Lardero and Villamediana de Iregua with 4,165,034.92 euros.
The provisional beneficiaries amount to a total of 50 projects with aid ranging from 675,000 euros to 10 million euros per project and an average funding percentage of more than 80% of the budget, reaching values of up to 100%. The aid will cover the entire national territory, benefiting all the autonomous communities. Andalusia and the Valencian Community, the regions that showed the greatest participation in the application phase, are also the ones that will receive the greatest amount of aid.
The autonomous communities that achieve the highest cofinancing rates are Aragón with 100% financing, Extremadura with 97% and Castilla y León with 93%. With all this, 1,155 municipalities and a population of 13,171,842 inhabitants will benefit from the aid of this second call of the PERTE. The aid will benefit projects that deal with water management in large cities such as Malaga and Seville but, mainly, it is intended for small municipalities in rural areas, benefiting approximately 840 localities with a population of less than 5,000 inhabitants.
The beneficiaries are operators and holders of urban water supply, sanitation and purification services of various kinds, such as local government entities, public companies, joint enterprises and representatives of the private sector. The number of beneficiary entities is more than one hundred.
It highlights the presence of public operators, with 70 beneficiaries in which the different administrative levels are represented, including entities of municipal scale (mainly municipalities and municipal companies), supramunicipal (mainly communities and consortiums) and projects led by entities of provincial and autonomous nature (mainly deputations).
Likewise, private operators through 21 companies are also beneficiaries. In addition, it is possible to encourage public-private collaboration through projects led by groups between private companies and public bodies, as well as with the participation of a dozen companies of a mixed nature.
The set of projects proposed as beneficiaries will have an essential impact on the transition to digitalization and the new regulatory challenges of the sector, allowing to improve the efficiency of the integrated urban water cycle from catchment, storage and distribution, to sanitation and purification, thus contributing to a more efficient and sustainable use of this resource.
In total, with this provisional resolution and that of the first call for irrigation, which is imminent, the PERTE of digitization of the water cycle has already mobilized more than 950 million distributed among urban cycle operators (500 million), irrigation users (100 million), Autonomous Communities (200 million) and Hydrographic Confederations (150 million).
In the coming weeks, the second call for the use of irrigated water (100 million) through transfers will be published.
On the other hand, MITECO is already working on the third call for aid to the urban water cycle that will be through ICO loans, with a projected investment of 635 million. It is expected that, once signed the Agreement with the ICO for the management of this budget, the third call may be published at the end of this year 2024, along with a first call for the improvement of water in the management of the industry of 100 million.