Call for Applications: Enterprise Europe Network

The Network offers a combination of learning opportunities, tailored advice, and support to find the best partnerships. In recent years, the Network has expanded its services to help companies make the transition to greater environmental and social sustainability, improve their resilience to shocks and achieve digital transformation.

The EENergy project has been funded by the EU’s Single Market Program (SMP), to support SMEs to define an action plan to improve their energy efficiency performance, and to carry out this action plan. The goal of EENergy is to support at least 1800 SMEs to identify their energy efficiency needs and define a corresponding action plan for solving these needs. A maximum of €9 Million will be provided to at least 900 SMEs across countries participating in the SMP, allowing them to increase their resilience to energy price fluctuations and energy supply chain disruptions, while also increasing their sustainability and reducing their environmental impact. This direct financial support, realised through investments in technological solutions and access to dedicated consultancy and upskilling expertise, aims to lead to an efficiency performance improvement of at least 5% for the participating SMEs.

EENergy will be executed by, and with the support of, the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) which, since 2008, has been supporting European SMEs to grow, scale, and reach their business goals. The EEN acts within the policy goals defined in the SME and EU Industry Strategy with a core focus on sustainability. The EEN is the world’s largest SME support network, present in 39 countries in Europe with around 300 publicly financed regional support nodes for SMEs offering services across several topics including innovation, sustainability, digitalisation, internationalisation, and access to finance, all of which shall help SMEs become active in and beyond the EU Single Market.

Eligible Activities

Financial Support to Selected Eligible SMEs

• Financial support of up to €10,000 will be allocated to the funded beneficiaries. These funds provided by EENergy must be used for the implementation of actions resulting in improved energy efficiency for the beneficiary SME. The contractual aim of the activities is to achieve a 5% reduction in energy consumption. These actions must fall within one or several of the following three categories:
  • Investment: This category covers the implementation, acquisition, purchase, and/or installation of new software, hardware, equipment, or other technologies.
  • Consultancy: This category covers advisory & consultancy services related to the identification and implementation of energy efficiency improvements, as well as energy audits.
  • Skills & Training: This category covers access to trainings, courses, classes, and programs for education and upskilling of employees in energy efficiency topics.
• A mixture of the activities across the three types is possible, with overall budgets larger than €10.000, but the overall grant funding to be provided will not exceed €10,000 per SME. Hence, an SME may either apply for financing 100% of an activity with a budget up to €10.000, or it may propose a larger activity with a larger budget, to be co-financed from alternative private sources.

Advisory Support to All Eligible SMEs

• Independent of the financial support, all eligible applicants shall benefit from all EEN advisory services which support increased energy efficiency activity implementation (e.g., innovation, sustainability, resilience, digitalisation, internationalisation and business partnering, patenting and standardisation, access to finance). All services will be provided in line with the needs of the company.

Tracking Changes in EE Outcomes

• A core aspect of EENergy is the impact evaluation study which will run in parallel to the execution of the open call and the activities implementation. This study aims to generate learning for future programming and funding measures. To serve the needs of the study, the final allocation of funds to beneficiaries is conducted through a random selection process amongst eligible actors. This process ensures fairness (each eligible candidate is treated in same manner) and allows a rigorous evaluation as the funded and regular beneficiaries are ex-ante comparable across many characteristics.
• The process will help identifying the effectiveness and efficiency of the financial investments and will foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation in program design and delivery. The relevant outcome data to conduct the impact evaluation will be collected in the course of the program implementation and after its completion.

Eligibility Criteria

• The EENergy open call is open to any legal entity which fulfils the following criteria:
  • It is established and operational in one of the countries participating in the EU’s single market program which includes:
    • The EU member states
    • The SMP COSME Strand: Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway
    • EU Acceding countries, candidate countries, potential candidates, and European Neighbourhood Policy Countries which participate in the SMP: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye, and Ukraine.
  • the main considerations being that the legal entity:
    • Is an enterprise, i.e., engaged in an economic activity, AND
    • Has a staff headcount of less than 250 full-time equivalents, AND
    • Has an annual turnover of €50 Million or less,
    • Has a balance sheet total of €43 Million or less,
• For any non-independent entities (i.e., those with a shareholding in other enterprises, or those that have other enterprises within their own shareholding structure), the above criteria must be assessed according to the methodology set out in the SME user guide. In case of any doubt, your EEN advisor can help to clarify the SME status during the determination of the action plan.
• It was incorporated and operational before 01.01.2023.
• This restriction ensures that SMEs have a baseline energy consumption performance period of at least 1 calendar year, necessary to fulfil the approach of the open call. Furthermore, SMEs should have energy consumption data available which corresponds to this period.

For more information, visit EENergy.