EU Investors and Thought-Leaders Join to defend Innovation Fund

The EU is considering slashing the size and diluting the focus of the ETS Innovation Fund, its main vehicle for financing the scale-up of clean technologies, to finance the REpowerEU plan. This at a time when the US is announcing unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars of tax credits, grants and loans for clean technologies.

EUREC, together with 18 cleantech investors and policy leaders, has signed an open letter to the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union, urging policymakers to avoid this historic mistake.

The letter contains the following proposals:

Grow the Innovation Fund
Maintain the fund’s focus on innovation
Make it more accessible to the new generation of industry
Use the ‘near-miss’ projects to develop a sharper selection criteria
More support is needed for innovative renewables and renewable energy value-chains

The next three years are critical for the global innovation race, and for moving emerging technologies that mitigate GHG emissions towards a place, where heading to the 2030s, these technologies can be commercialised.