PenInfo Desk: The EU Commission has selected 85 innovative net-zero projects to receive €4.8 billion in grants from the Innovation Fund, helping to put cutting-edge clean technologies into action across Europe. For the first time, projects of different scales (large, medium and small, alongside pilots) and with a cleantech manufacturing focus are awarded under the 2023 call for proposals. This is the largest since the start of the Innovation Fund in 2020, boosting the total amount of support to €12 billion and increasing the number of projects by 70%.
The selected projects are located in 18 countries. These countries are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden and Norway. They cover a wide range of sectors from the following categories like energy-intensive industries, renewable energy, energy storage, Industrial Carbon Management, net-zero mobility (including maritime and aviation) and buildings.
The selected projects are set to enter into operation before 2030 and over their first ten years of operation are expected to reduce emissions by about 476 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. This will contribute to European decarbonization objectives, reducing emissions from those sectors that are particularly difficult to decarbonize, strengthen European industrial manufacturing capacity and reinforce Europe’s technology leadership and supply chain resilience.
The Commission will launch the next call for proposals under the Innovation Fund in early December 2024. The Innovation Fund is implemented by the CINEA, while the European Investment Bank (EIB) provides the project development assistance to promising projects that are not sufficiently mature for Innovation Fund grants.
The 2023 call for proposals of the Innovation Fund attracted 337 project applications of which 283 were eligible and admissible for evaluation. Among the 85 selected projects, the Innovation Fund is now also supporting projects in Estonia and Slovakia, enlarging the list of countries receiving funding.
Peninfo/desk/07.11.24/12.10am