16 Feb Towards a Climate Neutral Future with Horizon 2020

Challenge

Europe’s future lies in innovation that comes from the whole industry players. However, innovative ideas that address grand societal challenges or strategic industrial technologies are risky to undertake and finance. EU funding programmes, including Horizon 2020, offer opportunities to develop projects to help Europe achieve its strategic goals towards a climate-neutral Europe with a 50% emission reduction by 2030.

While EU fundings programmes provide financial opportunities for the sector to innovate, the number of available funding schemes requires the project developers to assess every call and decide the proper funding to apply or if the proposal meets all the criteria for the call. Each proposal call is unique, and identifying the fittest can require a substantial hurdle.

Therefore, pushing forward the ideas, building partnerships to bridge skills gaps, developing the project, and unlocking the targeted funding is challenging and highly competitive.

Solution

To overcome the challenges of the complicated application process, we identified the needs of a project and provided clear recommendations on where and how to start an EU funding application. We used our extensive network to reach the European Commission or any other responsible institutions about which call would best fit the proposal/project. Our experts provided the project promoters with insights about developing a positioning strategy vis-à-vis specific funding instruments.

We stressed a lot that the composition of partners should best serve the project’s definition and goals by avoiding any redundancies. All the tasks must be well-covered by the expertise of the consortium partners. CLERENS also proposed legally binding documents for involved partners to not be any surprise when developing the proposals and submitting them.

For Horizon 2020, CLERENS was set to prepare a highly successful application through a proposal development process customised to the clients’ specific needs. Well-balanced planning along with perfectly distributed tasks and roles were set as a must to finalise the proposals on time. CLERENS cared about any eligibility or admissibility components from the beginning until the end, including flawless proposal submission. CLERENS assisted the partners with precise budget planning and negotiated the individual costs so that any inconsistency would not impact the overall note.

Result

CLERENS has contributed to more than 12 Horizon2020 projects! We did so by writing proposals, building consortia, and winning 66% of our submitted projects. We also support the implementation of European projects through a variety of activities:

• Management of the project ecosystem and networking;
• Project management and coordination;
• Communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities;
• Stakeholder engagement;
• Technical activities specific to the project’s nature;
• Cost-benefit analysis modelling;
• Policy assessment for the project’s replication.

These projects cover many topics, all relating to energy, from upskilling and education to battery research, smart grids development, renewable energy, electric mobility, support for R&I, energy transition, energy storage or the sustainability of materials. In total, these projects have totalled more than €47 million in funding received from Horizon2020!

Most of these projects are still ongoing and will have the possibility to be further supported and developed with Horizon Europe. The Commission will publish more project calls through the new Horizon Europe funding programme until 2027.

We can help you grasp these exciting opportunities and promote your projects that can contribute to the EU’s green objectives. For more information, you can contact us at info@clerens.eu.