“A rainforest of paperwork,” recalled Roeland Baan, CEO of Topsoe, a Danish firm making electrolyzers, a key component in hydrogen production. The process, he said, took nearly eight months. Meanwhile, an application for green subsidies in the United States, he said, took just a few weeks.
“A total jungle,” agreed Jacqueline van den Ende, co-founder of Carbon Equity, an Amsterdam-based company that invests in funds backing more than 100 climate-friendly startups.
“You need to hire specialist advisers who are really well-versed in raising grant funding to help you navigate the process, and often that is so time-consuming that a lot of companies don’t even start,” she added.
That gives an advantage to more established companies, startup advocates argue, given their extensive legal compliance departments and history of navigating the byzantine Brussels bureaucracy.
The battleground for these fights is the EU’s so-called Innovation Fund, created to dole out money to potentially game-changing technologies that might not yet have a great business case to catch a bank’s interest.
Yet after four years, the bulk of money given out from the fund has gone to large companies. Cleantech for Europe, which lobbies in Brussels for climate-friendly tech firms, calculated that only nine of the 72 projects selected for financial help were led by smaller, next-generation firms.
