Innovative renewable energy demonstration projects and carbon-capture schemes across Europe will benefit from more than €2 billion raised by sales of 300 million emission allowances. The European Investment Bank (EIB) has successfully completed sales under the NER300 programme, one of the largest funding programmes for carbon capture and storage demonstration projects and innovative renewable energy technologies and €548 million has been raised during the second phase of sales. “The European Investment Bank is pleased to support future investment in low-carbon demonstration projects,” said Jonathan Taylor, EIB vice-president. “Successful completion of monetisation of carbon allowances under the NER300 scheme will help both carbon capture and storage schemes and innovative renewable energy projects across Europe reach a commercial scale. “We’ll continue to work closely with the European Commission to ensure that the best applicants can be awarded proceeds raised from the scheme.” The NER300 was initiated to support large-scale demonstration projects. “We’ll need more of this type of innovation support in the transition to a low-carbon economy. I’m glad that the EIB has joined us in this innovative work,” said Jos Delbeke, director general for climate action, European Commission. The EIB, acting on behalf of the European Commission, started to sell the first tranche of 200 million of the EU allowances covered by the NER300 scheme on 5 December 2011. More than €1.5 billion was raised during the first phase of sales that ended in September 2012. From this, €1.2 billion was awarded to 23 projects out of 79 applications examined. Monetisation of the last 100 million EU allowances resumed in mid-November 2013 and ended on 11 April, 2014. As outlined in the final monthly monetisation report published on EIB’s website, gross proceeds from the second phase of sales represented €548 million. Monthly sales over the five-month second phase averaged around 20 million EU allowances and reflected both the number of trading days and overall market liquidity. The majority of EU allowances were sold as direct screen trades, 99 million EU allowances and 1 million EU allowances were cleared as over-the-counter transactions. No further sales will take place under the NER300 initiative now that the full volume has been reached. The EIB supports the NER300 Initiative as an agent of the European Commission fulfilling two separate roles – firstly, appraising projects that have been submitted by member states and are seeking funding from the programme and secondly through monetisation of allowances. For the second phase, a total of 33 project applications were received by the EIB by July 2013 and these have since been examined in detail. The European Commission is expected to announce details of awards to successful projects later this year.