Governments are invited to use EU auction and grant instruments to back promising cleantech projects which don’t win EU funding
Photo credits: Rafael Maggion / Unsplash
The European Commission is encouraging more member states to channel funding for clean technologies through EU instruments such as the European Hydrogen Bank. The idea is that governments should use auction and granting mechanisms established by the EU as a service, reducing overheads and essentially pooling EU and national funding.
Taking a lead from software-as-a-service (SaaS) models in business, this approach is being called auctions-as-a-service (AaaS) and grants-as-a-service (GaaS).
In its Clean Industrial Deal proposal, published earlier this month, the Commission presented GaaS and AaaS as a “proven model” for pooling EU and national resources. As a test case, it is offering countries the possibility to use the auction process of the European Hydrogen Bank to identify and fund renewable hydrogen projects.
The Hydrogen Bank is…
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