EU Invests €1.8 Billion in Clean Tech Projects

The EU is investing over €1.8 billion in 17 large-scale innovative clean-tech projects with the third round of awards under the Innovation Fund. Grants will be disbursed from the Innovation Fund to help bring breakthrough technologies to the market in energy-intensive industries, hydrogen, renewable energy, carbon capture and storage infrastructure, and manufacturing of key components for energy storage and renewables.

The selected projects are located in Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. The 17 projects were selected under the second call for large-scale projects, meaning they have capital costs above €7.5 million. The projects were evaluated by independent experts based on their ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to traditional technologies and to innovate beyond the state-of-the-art while being sufficiently mature for deployment. Other selection criteria included the projects' potential for scalability and cost-effectiveness.

The selected projects cover a wide range of sectors contributing to the EU's decarbonization efforts such as production, distribution, and use of green hydrogen, waste-to-hydrogen, offshore wind, manufacturing of photovoltaic (PV) modules, battery storage and recycling, carbon capture and storage, sustainable aviation fuels, and advanced biofuels. Together, they have the potential to save 136 million tonnes of CO2eq over their first 10 years of operation. In addition, up to 20 projects that are promising but not yet sufficiently mature for a grant will be pre-selected for project development assistance by the European Investment Bank. These will be announced in the fourth quarter of 2022.