The European Commission will launch a Horizon Europe funding call worth around €600 million ($698 million) in December 2025 to support research and innovation projects aligned with the EU’s Clean Industrial Deal.
Outlined in the Clean Industrial Deal Communication, the call will target innovation actions in the final stages of development, with the aim of advancing “fit-for-deployment” clean technologies, clean energy solutions and net-zero manufacturing systems.
The call will focus on two main areas:
- Clean tech for climate, including net-zero energy systems, zero-emission power generation, and advanced energy-storage technologies such as batteries and renewable hydrogen.
- Decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries, covering carbon-cycle management, clean-energy integration and circular industrial processes.
By leveraging both public and private investment, the initiative aims to build a pipeline of projects that can move from research and innovation to market-ready deployment. The Commission said the approach is intended to support technological excellence, accelerate commercial uptake, and ensure market readiness.
The funding call will adopt a bottom-up, industry-driven structure to strengthen competitiveness and decarbonisation across European industrial sectors. This is expected to encourage cross-sector system integration, reinforce manufacturing capacity, improve value-chain resilience, and help reduce the energy-cost gap for competitively priced low-carbon solutions.
The initiative is being coordinated jointly under Horizon Europe by Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry & Space) and Cluster 5 (Climate, Energy & Mobility).
The call will be published as part of the Horizon Europe Horizontal Work Programme 2026–2027, scheduled for release in December 2025.
