EU Innovation Fund Projects List and How Suppliers Find Them

The EU Innovation Fund projects list is one table on the European Commission's Innovation Fund projects page, listing the projects selected under the fund's calls and auctions. Each row shows the project's type, category, sector, location, technology pathway and status (European Commission). It is a funding record. It tells you who won money.

CINEA, the executive agency the Commission has entrusted with the fund's projects, adds a project portfolio page with country fiches and an interactive dashboard you can filter (CINEA). Each auction round, such as the IF25 hydrogen auction, also gets its own results page.

A row gives you a project name, a country and a status. It says nothing about the person who will buy your pump, skid or control system. To get from the table to that person, take three steps:

1. Screen every row by status.
2. Score the projects that survive for fit.
3. Find the people at each coordinator company who own your part of the build.

Where does the official project table live?

There are four official sources. Use each one for one job.

The projects page says quantitative information on projects already being implemented sits on the dashboards. So the table runs ahead of the dashboard. A project invited to prepare its grant agreement shows up in the table before it has any implementation data to filter.

The gap runs to months. CINEA says 61 projects from the 2024 call were selected to start grant agreement preparation in November 2025, and 54 had signed by 24 March 2026.

The invitation is not a funding commitment either. The 2022 small-scale call document says legal checks still have to clear before the grant is awarded.

The dashboard is still the better place to start a filtered list. CINEA launched it in January 2023 to cover every program entrusted to the agency, with the Innovation Fund next to CEF, LIFE, Horizon and EMFAF. You can filter it by country or theme and export the raw data for your own analysis (CINEA).

Start there, then add the newest rows from the projects table by hand.

Neither source is a target list yet. A filtered export still has withdrawn, duplicate and mismatched rows in it, and cleaning them out decides most of the result. Sharper wording does nothing for a bad list. In most campaigns the list is the problem, not the email.

What counts as an Innovation Fund project buyer?

The buyer is the company behind a selected project, which the results pages usually name as the coordinator. The fund awards grants through regular calls and through auctions in five areas (European Commission). Each area points to a different group of suppliers:

• Energy-intensive industries: the Commission's examples include cement, steel, waste-to-energy and chemicals. Buyers here need process equipment, electrification and heat systems.
• Renewable energy: generation projects, plus the factories that make their components.
• Energy storage: storage systems, and the plants that make cells and materials.
• Industrial carbon management: capture units, plus CO2 transport and storage engineering. UK carbon capture buyers sit outside this fund's country list and form their own carbon capture supply chain.
• Net-zero mobility and buildings: fuels, vehicles and building products that cut emissions in use.

The money behind all of this is industrial. The fund is financed from EU Emissions Trading System revenues: polluters pay for their emissions, and that money goes back into the fund (European Commission).

The Commission's 2023 progress report says the fund demonstrates technologies meant for commercial use, both low-carbon and zero-carbon (Publications Office of the EU). These plants are built to run commercially, so they buy real equipment, engineering and services.

CINEA puts the fund at about EUR 40 billion from 2020 to 2030. It counts about 240 awarded projects and roughly EUR 13 billion awarded so far (CINEA).

The 2026 annual knowledge sharing report counts 197 ongoing projects at the end of 2025, with EUR 11.7 billion in committed EU contribution (Publications Office of the EU). One counts what is still running, the other everything ever awarded, so the numbers differ.

A buyer can be active before the grant is signed. A project invited to prepare its grant agreement has already been selected. Its team is now turning the application into a plan with dates and packages.

The main supplier contracts come later. CINEA's 2025 Innovation Fund Q&A says projects must reach financial close within 4 years after grant signature, and that signing the main contracts is part of financial close. So at the grant agreement stage, supplier choices are still open.

Which project statuses matter for suppliers?

The projects table uses four status labels. Each one calls for a different move:

Two details in the official pages catch people out.

Old results pages stay online. The Commission's page on its third large-scale call reports 239 applications and 41 projects selected to prepare grant agreements, committing EUR 3.6 billion. The page carries an update date of 14 July 2023 (European Commission), yet it still reads like fresh news.

Before a project from any results page goes on your list, check its status in the main table.

Projects come back. At the time of writing, Gen2-LH2 shows as Withdrawn under the IF24 hydrogen auction and as invited to grant agreement preparation under IF25 (European Commission). Key your sheet to company and project name. Key it to the round and you drop a live buyer because an older row said Withdrawn.

How do you use the portfolio dashboard without wasting time?

The dashboard is a reporting platform. Browse it and you lose an afternoon. Use it to build one sheet. Run it in this order:

1. Pick the theme closest to what you sell. Build one sheet per theme.
2. Filter to the countries you can deliver to and support after the sale.
3. Export the raw rows.
4. Sort by status, move Withdrawn rows to a watch tab and delete Terminated rows.
5. Add the newest projects from the projects table.
6. Open the self-service window once and build a pivot of projects by country and sector. It shows where your sheet clusters.

Now the human check. Pull 20 random rows and check each one by hand. Can't say why a project would need your product? Delete the row.

Here is a worked example with a made-up supplier. It sells water purification skids for electrolysis plants and has engineers who can deliver in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

In the dashboard, the supplier picks the hydrogen theme, selects those six countries, exports the rows, parks withdrawn rows on a watch tab and drops the terminated ones. Then it adds the IF25 hydrogen auction rows from the projects table, which all read invited to grant agreement preparation.

That sheet has live rows only, in markets the supplier serves. It has no people on it yet. Those come from the auction results and the scoring below.

How do hydrogen auction results fit into the portfolio?

Auctions are the fund's competitive bidding route, and they run alongside the regular calls. CINEA's auctions page sends you to the project portfolio for the awarded projects of earlier rounds (CINEA).

The IF25 hydrogen auction covered two hydrogen types across the European Economic Area: RFNBO hydrogen (renewable fuels of non-biological origin, in practice hydrogen made with renewable power) and electrolytic low-carbon hydrogen.

For a hydrogen supplier, the results page is the most useful single page in the portfolio (European Commission). The Commission first selected 9 projects in 7 countries, then added 4 from the reserve list, for 13 in total. They fall under three topics:

• RFNBO general: for example, AN-1-B in Greece.
• RFNBO low-carbon: for example, Cloudberry in Finland and Lotse in Germany.
• Maritime and aviation: for example, Gen2-LH2 and the Rogaland project.

The results table gives more than the main projects table. For each project it names the coordinator and shows the bid volume, bid capacity and bid price.

• The coordinator column hands you the company to research, so you skip a step.
• Bid capacity gives you a rough sense of the plant's scale. Whether that matches your usual order size is your call.
• Projects under the same topic face similar problems, so one well-built message can serve the whole topic.

Treat the auction as a narrow slice of the portfolio: small, recent and tied to one technology. For a hydrogen supplier it is a good first sheet to work. For everyone else it is a sideline. UK green hydrogen projects sit outside this fund's country list and are a separate buyer set. The US counterpart of this portfolio is the set of DOE loan-backed projects.

How should suppliers rank projects before outreach?

A public project list only becomes useful once it is a ranked account list with people on it. So scoring comes before any message.

Start with your own customers. Before I build any list, I look at who already buys from the company and search for projects that look like them. If your last five orders came from cement plants, the cement capture projects outrank a hydrogen hub, whatever the hub's headline value.

Why? Buyers compare you against other suppliers. Past orders from cement plants are the closest proof you can show a cement buyer. At a hydrogen hub you have none of it.

Then score each project from 0 to 2 on five questions:

1. Sector and technology: does it match what your past customers run?
2. Stage: is it invited or signed, with your part of the build still ahead?
3. Country: can you deliver there and reach the people through your channels?
4. Scale: does its size match your usual order?
5. Urgency: is your item needed in the next phase of the build?

Here is the decision rule:

• 8 to 10 points: start outreach now.
• 5 to 7 points: monitor. Check the status monthly and connect on LinkedIn without a pitch.
• Under 5 points: drop it.

A zero on stage or country drops a project whatever its total.

The project type in the table tells you what the build looks like and who to reach first:

Those titles are a starting point only. A procurement lead is usually worth finding. A Qcells USA job posting describes its procurement manager as the person who drives the purchase of major equipment, such as racking and inverters, from RFP to purchase order or contract execution.

I go back through a client's past deals and find out who actually made the buying decision on each one. Then I search with the titles that niche really uses and leave a bare "manager" off the list.

What should a supplier message say to an Innovation Fund project team?

Write about their project. The person reading knows their build, their schedule and the package that worries them. Your company history can wait.

In the first message, I sell the meeting. The service can wait. Pitching in that first note gets you ignored. Proof that fits their situation earns the reply, so I put a relevant past client or result inside the message itself.

Use the public context with care. Naming the round, the status and the technology shows you did your homework. Quoting their grant amount or bid price back at them adds nothing they do not already know.

Qualify before you ask for time. Confirm that the project is still live, and that this person owns the package you supply.

Here is a made-up example from the water purification supplier above, sent to a project lead in Greece. Swap in your own real proof before you send anything like it:

Subject: Water treatment for your IF25 electrolyzer

Hi Marta, I saw your hydrogen project was invited to grant agreement preparation in the IF25 auction. We have commissioned treatment skids for electrolyzers of this size before. [Replace with your own real project.] If that package is still open, we can share a short note on footprint and commissioning. Would a 15-minute call next week be useful?

The body runs under 60 words, with one piece of proof and one small ask.

What is the fastest way to turn the list into outreach?

Once the sheet is scored, it takes four steps:

1. Start from your scored sheet: invited and signed rows, in countries you serve. In Germany, Austria or Czechia, go through LinkedIn instead unless you have a compliant basis for email. This is not legal advice.
2. Identify the coordinator. Take it from a results page where one is named. Otherwise, search the project name to find the company behind it.
3. Map decision-makers. Pick two or three real titles per company, then verify every address. We hold the bounce rate below 0.5%.
4. Launch a multichannel sequence. I open with a LinkedIn touch and let email follow (the setup behind our LinkedIn outreach work). One or two messages will not do it, so I plan 5 to 6 touches across both channels as a minimum.

Buyers look up the people in your sales process, so I make sure each of their LinkedIn profiles holds up, including the founder's. Reply rates vary a lot by company. One got 2%. Another got 7.5%. The message was the same.

Posting about hydrogen or capture projects also helps people recognize your name. I treat that content as support for outbound.

Aim for conversations first. Every call starts as a conversation. Every contract starts as a call.

In the first month of sending, I watch for feedback: which project type answers, which title replies, and which title forwards you to a colleague. Use those answers to re-score your list after the first month.

What should you do if the public list is too broad?

The full portfolio covers five areas and hundreds of projects, so "Innovation Fund project" on its own does not define a target. Narrow it to your technology and the countries you serve, and the sheet gets short fast. Then the problem flips: the list becomes too small to carry a pipeline on its own.

Even 50 to 100 perfect-fit leads a month is a coin toss: some people will be busy, some not ready, some not interested. You need both quantity and quality.

So use the portfolio as your top tier and build volume around it:

• Top tier: the scored projects from the portfolio.
• Second tier: companies outside the portfolio that run the same kind of plant in the same countries. The funded projects show which technologies and sectors are moving. Write to this tier about the same problem.

Intent data is only one tool, and here I skip it. In a market with 1,500 target companies, only about a dozen may show intent signals. In a market like that, my team leaves intent data out and builds an offer that fits every company on the list.

Once the shortlist is stable and you know what each tier needs, stop browsing public tables. A supplier that already has its sending set up and only needs more of the right accounts gets more from a custom lead list than from another afternoon in the dashboard.

This week, export one theme for the countries you deliver to, set the withdrawn rows aside and score what is left. The top of that score is your first outreach list.

Turning the project portfolio into a ranked account list is the hard part. Book a call and bring your technology and target countries.