Maximum upfront financing was limited to 60%

“Maximum 60% of the awarded NER 300 funding can be provided as upfront funding”

This policy had been stated orally by ex-NER300 Head of Unit Piotr Tulej in a meeting with Member States and Project Sponsors on 10 April 2013.

By Jul 2015 the NER300 pot had swelled by 23 M EUR from asset management

The EC reveals that in 2014 23 M EUR was yielded from investment of the money not yet paid out to projects, and claims that this exceeds by “several times” the cost of “the EIB’s involvement” in NER300. It also says,

“All available funds resulting from the monetisation of 300 million allowances are now allocated to awarded projects, with the exception of a minor surplus of €2.6 million.”

1. NER300.com’s comment

   The phrase concerning the cost of the EIB’s involvement is misleading: in a summary paper referenced by the EC in the Impact Assessment, the EIB writes, “The EIB sold 300,000,000 EUAs for a total value of EUR 2,156,830,800 EUR (before deduction of expenses and EIB fees)”. The sum of the total awards made to projects is 2,104,867,924 EUR. If the surplus is 2.6 M EUR, then the cost of administering NER300 (excluding the time of EC personnel) is 49 M EUR, which is double the income so far from asset management. This is consistent with the amount of 34,729,701 EUR used by the EIB to cover “expenses, market fees and its own fee” in the first round, an amount which is disclosed in the above-referenced paper.

We now know what the EC’s ‘eligibility check’ consisted of

***UPDATE 10 Sept 2017: More evidence of the way in which the eligibility criteria assessment was performed appears in DG Research and Innovation’s September 2016 FOAK study. “Independent assessors” were used, who indeed categorised each project’s innovativeness according to the four degrees listed below.***

As part of the eligibility check, projects were screened for innovation. The EC “estimate[s] that almost 80% of the NER 300 awards went to highly innovative or even potentially game changing projects.” An early draft of the Impact Assessment (which leaked) is more explicit: they were scored 1-4, one presumes according to the same scheme described in footnote 99 of the final version: “1. Little or no innovation 2. Some innovation demonstrated, but mainly incremental 3. Highly innovative project for some component or aspect of technology 4. Highly innovative project that is likely to represent a game changing step in technology.”

To determine eligibility, the EC performed “a qualitative analysis […] based on difference of the project’s technology from existing solutions, availability of the project’s technology amongst other vendors, availability of previous tests for the chosen technology, potential for scale-up and replicability and availability of resources to be used by the project.”

Project sponsors were never officially told their eligibility score, nor what the EC considered distinguished their technology from “existing solutions”, or of the EC’s assessment of the “availability” of the technology their projects would use.

1. NER300.com’s comment

   With the existence of such information now confirmed, Project Sponsors will find it easier to request access to it in respect of their projects. They need to ask for the “report on the verification of Eligibility Criteria Assessment”, which, for first-call projects appears as item 22 on Table 1 at para 80 of the first-call Procedures Manual, or, for second-call projects, as item 14 on the table at para 69 of the second-call Procedures Manual.

White Rose’s award of 300 M EUR was 34% of its relevant costs

…meaning, from arithmetic, that its relevant costs were around 880 M EUR. According to NER300.com’s calculations and on the assumption that the NER300 project corresponds to the full 448 MW_e project described here, the ‘relevant costs’ are about the same as the extra investment costs of applying CCS on the White Rose plant. This is because the ‘avoided cost’ of not having to buy CO2 allowances for the sequestered CO₂ corresponds roughly to the additional cost of the coal needed to power the sequestering process.

EC declined half of applications for upfront finance

“It should be noted that although not all projects that required upfront funding were granted it this has not jeopardised their implementation. (Six projects awarded under the second NER 300 call applied for upfront funding but only three received it.)”