27 March 2026
The European Court of Auditors published on 20 March (then unpublished on 27 March – maybe the link will become live again) its ‘Special Report’ on the Innovation Fund (the press release remains online). EUREC supplied a quote taken from this longer statement below to Science Business for their article 24 March. Here are some of our key takeaways to the report:
Recommendation 1 calling for a ‘structured analysis’ – not critical for EUREC
Assuming the ECA put its most important recommendation first, the EC will have a breathed a sigh of relief as it opened the report, as Recommendation 1 is easy to bat away. The EC accepted the recommendation that Innovation Fund should be steered by a “structured and forward-looking analysis of the technological landscape” by referring to Innovation Fund’s existing internal mechanisms, then adding they would be reinforced “to allow for a structured analysis recommended by the ECA”. No commitment was made on what that “structured analysis” would look like.
Does that bother EUREC? No, and if one wants to know how technology is performing, one can always go to the Clean Energy Technology Observatory. One may disagree with the carve-out for sustainable battery manufacturing specifically, or for hydrogen, or (today) for industrial heat, but each was trailed in policy documents from the Commission or speeches by the Commission’s leaders (as the Special Report acknowledges), and were therefore subject to sufficient democratic scrutiny. But the ECA is right to point out the need to align political imperative with industry appetite: in Box 3 it notes the 2024 ‘Batteries’ call was undersubscribed. Call budget should be adapted to subscription levels.
Keep IF’s general openness
What’s a little hard to grasp from the ECA’s position is whether it would prefer Innovation Fund to be as bottom-up as possible, with the ‘structured analysis’ serving to control political impulses; or whether IF should be entirely programmed ‘top-down’, just with more technocratic rigour than it has been so far thanks to the “structured analysis”. EUREC prefers IF to be bottom-up, but with specific calls, especially where those calls give a chance to technologies that would be at a structural disadvantage if they had to compete in the ‘general’ calls. Horizon Europe, on the other hand, is the appropriate place to fund topics plucked from roadmaps written by representative groups of stakeholders in a sector.
IF has enough flexibility
The ECA would like to see somewhat more flexibility in the Commission’s support of winning projects, particularly around the deadlines for reaching important milestones (Recommendation 3). EUREC has found (in our report that is in fact referenced in the Special Report in another context) that beneficiaries find the Commission’s (CINEA’s) support to be substantial, while the Commission itself responds that it “already provides a high level of flexibility”. Probably enough, we would say. There has to come a point where the award of a project whose progress is too slow is cancelled and that money unlocked for newcomers.
IF projects’ GHG savings are still to come, but do need to ramp up quickly from now
The auditors highlight that little GHG has been avoided so far from IF projects. We agree with the Commission’s response that it’s still fairly early days for most projects; but aggregate savings need to lurch upward soon and peak in 2030 (Fig 10). It is interesting, using the data in the ECA’s report and the EC’s response, to calculate whether the intended GHG savings are worth the releases needed to raise IF’s funds, and it seems to be the case: 12 bn EUR has been committed to projects. Taking the EC’s estimated average CO2 price of 75 EUR/tonne, the support to these projects has “cost” 0.16 bn tonnes of CO2 emissions. But the EC still expects them to deliver 0.901bn tonnes of savings over their first ten years of operation, six times more.