Companies drown in 3,000 hours of paperwork to tap EU climate funds

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illuminem summarises for you the essential news of the day. Read the full piece in the Luxembourg Times or enjoy below:

🗞️ Driving the news: The EU’s flagship €7.1bn Innovation Fund, meant to accelerate clean-tech deployment, has paid out less than 5% of its committed funding due to extreme bureaucratic hurdles
• Companies report spending up to 3,000 hours and €85,000 per application to navigate the process — with fewer than 20% of applicants succeeding

🔭 The context: The Innovation Fund, financed by EU carbon-market (ETS) revenues, is designed to support first-of-a-kind climate technologies — from low-carbon cement to battery materials, green hydrogen and carbon capture
• But only 6% of awarded projects are operational and 15–20% face delays. Industry groups say smaller cleantech innovators are effectively priced out of applying

🌍 Why it matters for the planet: Slow disbursement undermines Europe’s ability to scale the climate technologies needed for its 2030 and 2050 targets
• The bottleneck delays emissions-cutting infrastructure, strengthens Chinese and US market dominance, and weakens the EU’s strategic autonomy in clean industry
• It also risks locking in fossil-based supply chains if green alternatives cannot reach commercial deployment fast enough

💬 One quote: “The biggest challenge is the amount of resources… for a frankly very low success rate,” says Cleantech for Europe director Victor van Hoorn.

⏭️ What’s next: ETS revenue could generate €40bn for the Innovation Fund by 2030, but unless the Commission streamlines milestones and lowers administrative burdens, experts warn that “most of the money will keep sitting idle,” delaying Europe’s clean-tech transition at a critical moment

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