Start your Innovation Fund application in time

Why is the Innovation Fund interesting?

The Innovation Fund is among the world’s largest funding initiatives dedicated to showcasing innovative low-carbon technologies. It is financed through revenue generated by the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), which auctions emission allowances. The fund supports groundbreaking technologies in renewable energy, energy-intensive industries, energy storage, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. The Innovation Fund is particularly appealing for companies because it provides significant financial support to scale up innovative projects in low-carbon technologies. By addressing key barriers such as high upfront costs and market risks, the fund enables companies to bring groundbreaking solutions to market more quickly and effectively.

What does the Innovation Fund include?

The Innovation Fund consists of two parts:

• European Hydrogen Auction: an initiative of the European Commission established in 2023 with the aim to support among other things the EU domestic renewable hydrogen production. The available budget for the coming auction will be 1.2 billion euros. The deadline will be in February 2025.
• Innovation Fund call: in the IF24 call 1 billion euros will be allocated to Electric Vehicle battery cells manufacturers, whereas the rest of the topics, i.e. general decarbonatisation (large, medium and small scale), manufacturing and pilots, are expected to remain. The deadline will be in April 2025.

Start your Innovation Fund application now

A full Innovation Fund cycle will take around eleven months from submitting a project to the actual start:

• submission of the project: April 2025
• announcement of evaluation results: October 2025 (expected)
• start of the Innovation Fund project: March 2026 (expected).

But actually to be able to submit an optimal application in April, preparations should start now because it simply takes time. In order to help its clients to submit an optimal application PNO has developed an integrated approach. This contains a wide range of services for preparing the Innovation Fund application. The full Innovation Fund cycle can therefore easily be extended with four to five months preparation time.

Integrated approach for preparing an Innovation Fund application

PNO’s integrated approach for preparing an Innovation Fund application consists of three elaborate steps. We show you a simplified version of it:

1. viability check/project assessment:

• assessing the potential of the project to be a successful one in the Innovation Fund programme
• providing a GO/NO GO recommendation on submission of an application in the upcoming or a future Innovation Fund call or auction

2. project scoping/process preparation management:

• positioning and discussing the boundaries of the project and alignment of its scope with instrument criteria, EU priorities & national strategies
• defining of the project scope, activities and budget in alignment with award criteria (including calculating the GHG emission avoidance potential in the Innovation Fund call)
• defining and implementing a clear process, division of work and a timeline for the funding scheme application process

3. application writing/application submission:

• writing application documents as well as providing guidance and challenge teams regarding the level of detail and the quality of explanation
• continuous monitoring and safeguarding of grant application alignment with the selected funding scheme award criteria
• taking care of the correct and timely submission of the complete funding application.

Other services

Besides an integrated approach to preparing an application for the Innovation Fund, PNO also offers a service for grant agreements once a project has been preselected. Of the 85 projects recently preselected, PNO is now preparing a number of grant agreements so that the projects can start in March 2025.

Do you want to apply for the Innovation Fund?

Do you have serious ideas or project plans that may qualify for the Innovation Fund? Start your Innovation Fund application in time. Our experts will be happy to assist you.