The European Commission has selected 77 net-zero technology projects for a combined 3.4 billion euros of support under the Innovation Fund, its programme financed from revenues of the EU Emissions Trading System. The projects span energy-intensive industries, renewable energy, energy storage, cleantech manufacturing, net-zero mobility, critical raw materials processing and recycling, advanced alternative fuels and industrial carbon management.
Two selections mark firsts for the fund. The round includes a small modular nuclear reactor project and a direct air carbon capture and storage project, technologies the Commission has previously supported through research programmes rather than deployment grants. Six of the projects process or recycle critical raw materials, which the Commission links to the Net-Zero Industry Act and its supply chain programme for inputs such as rare earth permanent magnets and batteries.
The Commission expects the 77 projects to avoid about 290 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over their first ten years of operation. That is a projection attached to the selection, not a measured outcome, and delivery now depends on grant agreements being finalised by the first quarter of 2027 and on sponsors raising the much larger balance of project capital the grants only part-fund.
The structure is the point for this beat. The Innovation Fund converts carbon allowance auction revenue into industrial equity-like support without a budget appropriation, which makes the ETS price itself a funding variable for European cleantech manufacturing. A second call at this scale, heavily oversubscribed in its earlier rounds, keeps that channel open at a moment when private cleantech capital has become more selective.