“Of the projects awarded under the first call only three projects have been withdrawn,” announced the European Commission a year and a half ago, even as ever more projects were pushing back their Date of Entry into Operation to the latest possible date.

The situation was presented more soberly in September 2016, 45 months after First Call projects had been notified of their award and 3 months before their deadline to obtain all relevant permits and reach their Final Investment Decision. The EC revealed that six projects out of the 19 in the First Call had reached Final Investment Decision. By the end of November, that number had risen to 9. The deadline for first call projects has now passed. “Full clarity on the scale of unused funds from the first call will be known by the end of February 2017,” states the EC.

Roman Doubrava, deputy head of the unit responsible for NER300 in the EC, said on 30 Nov, “We have been following the projects going on facing different difficulties, and there are some lessons learned. We will be publishing some outcomes of the analysis we are currently making towards the end of the year.” He was speaking at the SET Plan conference 2016 in Bratislava. That report is still not public, but is expected to be published before DG CLIMA’s conference, “Finance for innovation: Towards the ETS Innovation Fund” on 20 Jan 2017. This is the second conference on ETS Innovation Fund (details on the first one here).

The Commission’s only regular, formal and public report on the status of NER300 projects has, since 2014, been the annual publication of the latest version of the award decision. It contains the date that each project should enter operation. Every year more and more projects have pushed their date of entry into operation to the latest allowable date (details).