Fixing the Commission’s innovation fixation: three recommendations for the overhaul of the Innovation Fund

The document argues that the EU Innovation Fund's current overhaul risks funding projects with marginal abatement potential due to outdated benchmarks. It recommends updating reference points to target the highest emission-reduction potential, making resource saving a mandatory criterion for support, and prioritizing economy-wide scalability over local or sectoral scalability to ensure true sustainability.

• The draft revision of the Delegated Act for the Innovation Fund may award grants to projects with minimal emissions reductions because the greenhouse gas emission avoidance criterion relies on EU ETS benchmarks from 2016-17, which are outdated and potentially higher than current best available technologies.
• Resource saving is currently treated as an optional 'plus' within the 'degree of innovation' or 'scalability' criteria; the authors argue it should be a mandatory criterion of equal importance to innovation to ensure project scalability.
• The current scalability criteria weight local, sectoral, and economy-wide levels equally, which may allow unsustainable practices—such as hydrogen for domestic heating—to receive high scores if they appear scalable locally or sectorally despite being unsustainable at an economy-wide scale.
• The overhaul of the Innovation Fund introduces a competitive bidding mechanism using 'contracts' to complement grants, a category for medium-scale projects, and 'auction-as-a-service' for member states to allocate additional national resources.

APA

Ruggiero, A. (2023). Fixing the Commission’s innovation fixation: three recommendations for the overhaul of the Innovation Fund. Carbon Market Watch. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/2023/05/31/fixing-the-commissions-innovation-fixation-three-recommendations-for-the-overhaul-of-the-innovation-fund/

Chicago

Ruggiero, Agnese. Fixing the Commission’s innovation fixation: three recommendations for the overhaul of the Innovation Fund. Carbon Market Watch, 2023. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/2023/05/31/fixing-the-commissions-innovation-fixation-three-recommendations-for-the-overhaul-of-the-innovation-fund/.

Wikipedia

{{cite press release |last1=Ruggiero |first1=Agnese |title=Fixing the Commission’s innovation fixation: three recommendations for the overhaul of the Innovation Fund |publisher=Carbon Market Watch |date=31 May 2023 |url=https://carbonmarketwatch.org/2023/05/31/fixing-the-commissions-innovation-fixation-three-recommendations-for-the-overhaul-of-the-innovation-fund/ |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@misc{ruggiero2023fixing, author = {Ruggiero, Agnese}, title = {{Fixing the Commission’s innovation fixation: three recommendations for the overhaul of the Innovation Fund}}, publisher = {Carbon Market Watch}, year = {2023}, month = may, url = {https://carbonmarketwatch.org/2023/05/31/fixing-the-commissions-innovation-fixation-three-recommendations-for-the-overhaul-of-the-innovation-fund/}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }