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The European Commission approved Slovenia's industrial electricity price relief scheme on 16 April 2026 under Article 107(3)(c) TFEU as compatible with the internal market, relying on Section 5 of the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF, adopted 25 June 2025). The scheme delivers temporary operating-cost relief to Slovenian energy-intensive companies facing post-Russian-gas-cutoff electricity price exposure that the Commission treats as a trade-intensity carbon-leakage risk.
Aid delivery: The Slovenian scheme pays out twice yearly based on expected electricity consumption of beneficiaries, compensating for electricity costs above the CISAF-mandated reference wholesale price floor of €50/MWh. Relief covers the eligible share of each company's electricity consumption for the period January 2026 – December 2028.
Eligible beneficiaries: Companies in the CEEAG Annex-listed sectors facing significant electro-intensity carbon-leakage risk. For Slovenia the principal beneficiary sectors include energy-intensive industrial producers in chemicals, metals processing, glass, and cement.
Funding envelope: €90 million over three years (January 2026 – December 2028), financed through the Slovenian state budget. By per-capita quantum (approximately €43 per capita for SI's 2.1 million population), the scheme sits in the same band as Germany SA.120495 (~€45/capita) and Bulgaria SA.120414 (~€51/capita), establishing a de facto small-MS lower-bound CISAF Section-5 precedent.
Binding conditionality: Beneficiaries must reinvest at least 50% of aid received in energy-efficiency, electrification, or on-site-renewables assets within 48 months of receipt, with a hard prohibition on new fossil-fuel capacity expansion.
Three-Member-State coordination: IP/26/815 covers Slovenia (SA.120965, €90m), Bulgaria (SA.120414, €334m — filed at 2026-04-15-eu-bulgaria-cisaf-electricity-price-relief-sa120414), and Germany (SA.120495, €3.8bn — filed at 2026-04-16-eu-germany-cisaf-sa120495-electricity-price-relief) in a single coordinated Commission decision, for a combined package of approximately €4.22 billion.
Completes the IP/26/815 three-MS coordinated CISAF Section-5 tranche: Slovenia is the third and smallest leg of the same Commission decision. The 3-MS coordinated approval is a CISAF procedural innovation — rather than three sequential state-aid notifications, the Commission batched three structurally similar Section-5 notifications into a single decision, compressing approval timelines and establishing cross-MS consistency in conditionality design.
Small-MS per-capita quantum precedent: At €90 million for 2.1 million residents, the Slovenian scheme defines the small-Member-State lower bound for CISAF Section-5 electricity-price relief. This precedent is directly relevant to expected future notifications from Estonia, Cyprus, Malta, Croatia, Latvia, and Lithuania — all energy-intensive-industry host states with sub-3-million populations whose electricity cost structures were similarly disrupted by the post-Russian-gas era.
First Slovenian 2026 state-aid filing on the IPTM register: Slovenia had zero 2026-cohort action filings prior to this; SA.120965 establishes Slovenia as an active CISAF implementer and opens the SI-CISAF tracker thread in the register.
Instrument architecture: The Slovenian scheme shares the CISAF Section-5 template with Germany SA.120495 (grant-via-supplier) and Bulgaria SA.120414 (grant-via-supplier), but at 1/42nd and 1/3.7th the scale respectively. The per-payment-cycle structure (twice yearly, forecast-based) is specific to the Slovenian approval and may become the model for smaller-MS Section-5 cash-flow management.