As the funding landscape is continuously evolving, new calls for proposals are opening regularly in different focus areas. With this short newsletter, we provide you an overview on the main funding opportunities and developments at European level as well as in Flanders, Belgium.
Europe
– New Eureka call for low carbon projects
Eureka launched a new call for transnational joint projects between Austria, Belgium, Chile, France and Spain. The focus herein lies on low carbon emissions projects in the sectors of energy, waste management, agriculture & forestry and circular economy. A collaboration between at least two independent companies from two different eligible countries is required to be eligible for the project call. The support ranges from 35% to 100% of eligible costs, depending on the national or regional funding body. For Belgium specifically, these are Innoviris (Brussels), VLAIO (Fanders), and SPW (Wallonia).
Proposals can be submitted until 24 February 2023.
– New calls for EIC Accelerator
EIC Accelerator is a European funding programme supporting start-ups and SMEs working on market-oriented innovations with high growth potential. More specifically, the programme is focussed towards companies that wish to commercialise their innovative and disruptive technologies. Two types of EIC Accelerator applications can be submitted:
- EIC Accelerator Open (bottom-up) for any field of technology or application;
- EIC Accelerator Challenges (top-down) for predefined areas of emerging and strategic technologies.
The application procedure itself is characterised by two consecutive steps:
Step 1: short proposal which may be submitted throughout the year
Step 2: full proposal which may be submitted after an approved short proposal before pre-determined cut-off date.
For 2023, the known cut-off dates are 22 March, 7 July and 4th October. depending on the date of the short proposal. Grant amounts for technology development and validation (TRL 5 to 8) go up to € 2.5 M and for scaling-up activities (TRL 9) capital investment range from € 0.5 M to € 15 M.
Flanders, Belgium
– GREEN Investment programme for realising energy transition projects
In addition to the already existing ‘strategic ecology support’ (STRES) and ‘energy premium plus’ (EP+) programmes that support sustainable investments, Flanders launched his GREEN Investment Support programme. It aims to financially support companies that want to switch from fossil fuels to electricity or sustainable hydrogen, invest in heat pumps and improve the energy efficiency of their operations. The programme is meant for technologies that are not listed on the Limitative Technology List (LTL) of the EP+ funding programme. Projects can be funded for up to 40% of the eligible project costs with a maximum grant amount of € 1 M per project.
If you would like more information on any of these topics, do not hesitate to send an email to Bart Wyns (bart.wyns@pwc.com) or Tom Wallyn (tom.wallyn@pwc.com) from the PwC Incentives Hub.
