The Innovation Fund is the EU’s flagship climate policy initiative that focuses on supporting energy and industrial projects that contribute to Europe’s transition to climate neutrality. It aims to bring to the market solutions to decarbonise European industry and support its transition to climate neutrality while fostering its competitiveness.

The Innovation Fund focuses on highly innovative* technologies and flagship projects within Europe that can bring about significant emission reductions. The projects need to be sufficiently mature in terms of planning, business model and financial and legal structure.

The Innovation Fund is open to public and private legal entities. In general projects must be located in EU Member States or EEA countries (i.e. Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein).

*The Innovation Fund aims to support projects that go beyond incremental innovation. There are varying degrees of innovation ranging from breakthrough (such as completely new technologies, processes, business models, products or services which are likely to lead to significant change that transforms entire markets or industries or creates new ones) to intermediate (such as new or considerably changed technologies or processes or business models for the production or delivery of existing or new products or services).

Further details about what constitutes ‘innovation’ under this Fund can be found in Annex 1 of the call text: "Innovation Fund call 2024 Net Zero Technologies"

Calls for Proposals
On December 3, 2024, the European Commission launched two funding calls under the Innovation Fund:

• IF24 Call: €2.4 billion allocated for Net-Zero technologies.
• IF24 Battery: €1 billion allocated for electric vehicle battery cell manufacturing.
• Eligible categories:
  1. Energy intensive industries
  2. Carbon capture and utilisation
  3. Carbon capture and storage
  4. Renewable energy and battery storage

Eligible entities: Public and private legal entities

Geographical Location: EU Member State or EEA countries

The deadline for submission of Innovation Fund applications is April 24, 2025.

Orientation Dialogues for Applicants
To support potential applicants, the European Commission’s DG CLIMA and the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) are offering one-to-one and high-level orientation dialogue sessions in the first half of February 2025.

The orientation dialogues will be 25-minute sessions offering high-level guidance on the Innovation Fund. These sessions will focus on helping applicants understand the framework of the fund, discuss potential project outlines, and address general queries related to the call for proposals.

Project specific questions must be avoided and will not be answered during the orientation dialogue. Such questions can only be answered via the official helpdesk. This is important to ensure equal treatment of all applicants.

Please note that the orientation dialogues cannot pre-judge the outcome of the official evaluation procedure.

The Funds and Programmes Division (FPD), Office of the Prime Minster, European Funds, Equality, Reforms and Social Dialogue (OPM – EES), is inviting expressions of interest from organisations wishing to participate in the orientation dialogues.

Interested applicants are required to complete and submit a detailed questionnaire outlining their project. Access the questionnaire, and submissions must be made by February 5, 2025.

Interest in participation in orientation dialogues is assessed according to eligibility and level of maturity of project proposals. While only eligible and sufficiently advanced projects will be considered for participation in the orientation dialogues, early-stage projects are still encouraged to apply. These projects will receive tailored guidance from the FPD or SEM on alternative funding opportunities.

Interested applicants will be notified of the result by COB February 7, 2025.

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