Public Consultations. Innovation Fund

The European Commission has started the public consultation to evaluate the operations of the Innovation Fund by 2025.

📄 Form of Feedback – the online questionnaire via this link

📅 Feedback period – 15 April 2025 – 08 July 2025

✅ What is the Innovation Fund?

📌 The Innovation Fund is one of the world’s largest funding programmes for the deployment of net-zero and innovative technologies.

📌 The Innovation Fund was established by the Emissions Trading System (ETS) Directive to support innovation in low or zero-carbon products, processes and technologies in the sectors covered by the Directive.

📌 The Fund obtains its resources from ETS allowance revenues.

➡️ Source
☑️ Purpose and Scope of Evaluation:

📌 The European Commission will:

• evaluate the implementation of the Innovation Fund from 2020 to 2024.
• will focus primarily on assessing synergies between the Fund and other EU programmes, including Horizon Europe, and the procedures for disbursing financial support.

📌 The evaluation will assess:

• Effectiveness: the degree to which the Fund has succeeded in achieving its objectives of:
  1. supporting projects that demonstrate highly innovative technologies, processes and products;
  2. providing financial support tailored to market needs and risk profiles of eligible projects while attracting additional public and private resources;
  3. ensuring that Innovation Fund revenues are managed to accomplish the objectives of the ETS Directive.
• Efficiency: how ETS allowances have been employed to achieve the expected effects of the Fund, alongside the administrative burden associated with application, evaluation, and project implementation.
• Relevance: the connection between the Fund’s objectives and the attainment of EU climate targets, particularly emissions reduction and necessary technology development, while strengthening competitiveness and resilience.
• Coherence: how the various elements of the Fund function cohesively to achieve its objectives and how they synergise with the EU’s policy objectives and other programmes, such as Horizon Europe, the Recovery and Resilience Fund, and InvestEU.
• EU added value: the extent to which the results and impacts of the Fund contribute to changes prompted by the Commission’s intervention over what could reasonably have been expected from national actions.

➡️ Source: Industrial Decarbonisation Accelerator Act – speeding up decarbonisation