All you need to know about the newly adopted SET Plan

25 October 2023

On Friday 10 October, The European Commission adopted the revised Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan. The SET Plan is crucial in supporting research and innovation for the development of clean, secure and efficient energy technologies. The SET Plan paved the way for the BATT4EU co-programmed partnership under Horizon Europe.

The revised SET plan will take a task force approach to address the following cross-cutting issues:

• Digitalisation: “Ensuring that smarter assets can communicate easily and offer flexibility will be important in balancing supply and demand of our energy system, thus facilitating the integration of decentralised renewable energy sources and reducing their curtailment. Digitalisation will be key to supporting the flexibility that energy-intensive industries need to respond to challenges such as electrification or volatile energy supply”
• Upskilling and reskilling: “The revised SET Plan will support the European Net-Zero Industry Academies announced in the Net-Zero Industry Act, by building on the experience of the European Batteries Academy . Each academy will aim to train 100 000 people within their first 3 years.”
• Accelerated market uptake: “The revised SET Plan will develop strong links between the ETIPs and industrial alliances (the European Battery Alliance, the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance and the Solar PV Industry Alliance), to promote the development of viable investment projects and manufacturing capacity in clean energy technologies in the EU, and to address market, regulatory, infrastructure and technological barriers to their large-scale deployment.”
• Improve access to funding to scale up innovations: “The actors involved in the revised SET Plan should aim to secure increased financial support for the Clean Energy Transition Partnership co-funded under Horizon Europe, to support the stronger ambitions, including increased collaboration between ETIPs under the ETIPs Forum . Synergies and complementarities should be sought between the activities of the SET Plan and the Innovation Fund. The Commission calls upon SET Plan countries to increase efforts to spend 3% of their GDP on R&I and to foster the scale-up of innovations.”