Innovation Fund

The Innovation Fund is financed by EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) revenues. The Fund focuses on highly innovative clean technologies and big flagship projects with European added value that can bring significant emission and greenhouse gas reductions.

The fund specifically supports the industrial deployment of innovative technologies by contributing to the financing of CAPEX and OPEX with EU co-funding (grants).

The Innovation Fund is not expected to finance projects related to services or R&D but it will support manufacturing, production and use in different areas, one of which is Net-zero mobility.

Several calls are published every year. Despite that there are currently no separate calls dedicated to transport and mobility.

• The general call “Net Zero Technologies – General decarbonisation” can fund small-scale projects (<20M€ capex), medium-scale projects (<100M€ capex) and large-scale projects (>100M€ capex) in particular on: Energy efficiency (ex: vehicle to grid), sustainable alternative fuels, electrification, zero-emission vehicles. All these projects should have an industrial decarbonization process.
• The call “Pilot projects”, for its part, finances the construction and operation of projects validating, testing and optimizing highly innovative deep decarbonization solutions (example: tire recycling).

The Innovation Fund supports up to 60%(in case of regular grants) of the relevant costs calculated according to the methodology indicated in each call for proposals (usually covering capital and operational costs minus revenues over the first ten years of operation). Projects can be mono beneficiary.

The fund is handled by the European Commission, which has delegated the implementation to CINEA.

USEFUL RESOUCES:

• Innovation Fund – European Commission
• Innovation Fund Public Database
• Innovation Fund – call for proposal 2024

Back to all EU funding opportunities for public transport