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CINEA, the Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency, launched a call for preparatory studies to develop and identify cross-border projects in the field of renewable energy (CB RES) under the Connecting Europe – Energy Facility. The scope of this call is to support studies contributing to the development of the next generation of CB RES projects involving the provision of RES technologies.

Such studies can help project promoters to select the best project concept and build up cooperation agreement to implement it before projects have acquired the official CB RES project status.

A study can be designed as a pre-feasibility study. The contribution could also be used to provide technical, economic or legal support for the creation/advancement of cross-border cooperation with the aim of selecting the best project concept. As part of the preparatory study, some broader aspects related to the system can also be covered, e.g. the integration of additional investments for storage, or of investing additional investments for storage, or investments related to transport and/or digital for synergistic elements.

A study can be used to start exploring (mainly through desk studies) possible sites in the territory of Member States (and third countries, where appropriate), to determine host countries and off-taking countries, as well as other exploratory tasks necessary to assess the overall costs and benefits of the project.

It should allow identifying and formalising the basic cooperation mechanism and can include communication and stakeholder engagement activities.

The aim of the support is to enable project ideas to overcome obstacles that have prevented cooperation projects from moving forward in the past , such as uncertainty about the sharing of costs and benefits between the Member States involved or the additional complexity of creating cross-border support.

Projects contributing to the objectives of REPowerEU and to the initiatives announced under the REPowerEU plan from May 2022 are particularly relevant to the call, as are projects that accelerate the deployment of renewable hydrogen to replace natural gas, coal and oil in hard-to-decarbonize industries and transport.

The budget for a study should be between 100,000 and 350,000 euros.

Call budget: 1 million euros

Deadline: 10 January 2023

Official documentation to submit a project proposal is available here

Written by: Margherita Genua