EuropeThe European Investment Bank (EIB) announced at its July meeting that it will raise the additional funds earmarked for projects aligned with the REPowerEU initiative to $50 billion (€45 billion). The additional funding comes on top of the EIB's already substantial support for clean investments and represents a 50% increase compared to the original €30 billion REPowerEU package announced in October last year.
EIB also decided to broaden the scope of eligible sectors that can benefit from the package. Now sectors include solar photovoltaic and thermal technologies, onshore and offshore wind, battery and storage, heat pumps and geothermal technologies, electrolyzers and fuel cells, sustainable biogas, carbon capture and storage, and grid technologies—as well as investments related to the extraction, processing and recycling of related critical raw materials—can get EIB support to scale up their EU manufacturing capacity for state-of-the-art strategic net-zero technologies and products.
We are deploying the full range of our available financial firepower to support Europe's industrial competitiveness, manufacturing, and the rollout of critical technologies that will lead us to a swift and just transition to net zero.
—said Werner Hoyer, President of EIB.
Launched by the European Commission in May 2022, the REPowerEU initiative is dedicated to helping the EU save energy, produce clean energy and diversify its energy mix. Part of REPowerEU's focus is promoting massive investment in renewable energy. Over the last year, with the support of REPowerEU, over 41 GW of new solar capacity was installed.
Combined, the additional funding is expected to mobilize more than €150 billion in investment for the targeted sectors by 2027.
In February, the European Commission launched the Green Deal Industrial Plan and also positioned speeding up access to finance as one of the core pillars. It is considered to complement ongoing efforts under the European Green Deal and REPowerEU. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, said in a press release: "Better access to finance will allow our key clean tech industries to scale up quickly."
Besides an upgrade to its REPowerEU package, EIB also approved €10 billion for projects in energy, innovation, business investment, education, as well as for water infrastructure destroyed by the Turkish earthquake.
