18 June 2024 – This Friday, the European Investment Bank (EIB) Board of Governors will approve its new Strategic Roadmap for 2024-2027, which will support the EU build leadership and competitiveness in strategic cleantech sectors. Together with a group of 39 European cleantech innovators, investors, industry associations, researchers and NGOs, we have sent a letter to EIB President Nadia Calviño and Chairman of the Board Vincent Van Peteghem calling for expanding EIB guarantees to unlock EU industrial competitiveness.

Why public guarantees for cleantech?

• Several cleantech sectors are currently under pressure due to the large-scale investments being made by other global players like China and the US.
• European cleantech manufacturers are being forced to turn down orders for lack of bank guarantees, which greatly limits the growth of these clean industries in Europe. Without a targeted solution, European manufacturers and supply chains will suffer competitively, with non-European competitors seizing the market share and undermining Europe’s industrial base.

A leaked version of the EIB Strategic Roadmap underscores guarantees as one of the EIB instruments that can efficiently address the financing gap of cleantech start-ups and SMEs by crowding-in private investments.

The signatories of this letter strongly support this. By shifting risk from commercial banks to the EIB’s balance sheet and the European budget, via InvestEU, European banks can offer new guarantee lines for cleantech projects and promote bank lending to emerging cleantech manufacturing.

Guarantees are essential to scale-up Europe’s cleantech manufacturing significantly, reinforce the global competitiveness of EU green industry and secure Europe’s energy transition and resilience.

In the joint letter, we make five detailed asks that outline how the EIB can help grow strategic cleantech sectors with the expansion of its public guarantee and including both manufacturing guarantees and loan guarantees to ramp up manufacturing capacity.